From Circuits to Systems: Gong Zerui’s NTU Journey

For Gong Zerui, receiving the ITMA Gold Medal is more than an accolade – it is a quiet affirmation of how far he has come. It marks not just academic excellence, but growth earned through persistence, doubt, and a willingness to embrace the unknown.

“One particularly meaningful moment was the journey of developing my final-year project,” he shares. His team’s paper, SA-LUT: Spatial Adaptive 4D Look-Up Table for Photorealistic Style Transfer, was eventually accepted at the International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV) 2025. “It wasn’t just about the paper’s acceptance. It was the first time I truly felt I was contributing to the research community.”

That sense of purpose grew through real-world projects. From multidisciplinary projects to long nights in the lab, Zerui often found himself outside his comfort zone, and there were moments of self-doubt.

“I started questioning everything: was it just a technical issue, or was the entire concept flawed? But instead of giving up, I went deeper.” That breakthrough moment, born out of uncertainty, reshaped his confidence.

Zerui was also part of a newly revised Computer Engineering cohort; which meant little precedent and plenty of trial and error. During their Multi-Disciplinary Project, his team had to design a full robot pathfinding system from scratch.

“We had to design and implement the entire robot pathfinding algorithm from scratch. It was tough at the beginning… we hit a lot of dead ends… but we pushed through and made it work.” That experience taught him the value of first-principles thinking and trusting the process even when there was no template to follow.

Zerui says his time at NTU shaped not just his skills but his mindset. “I learned the importance of thinking critically, being intentional, and staying humble. NTU taught me not just how to solve problems, but how to ask better questions.”

His final-year project advisor, Professor Chen Change Loy, played a pivotal role. “He has a remarkable ability to identify gaps in any idea… whenever I proposed a direction, he would ask sharp, specific questions that forced me to reflect and refine my thinking. Just the act of answering those questions often led me to realize whether the idea was viable or not. He also has a meticulous eye… from punctuation to spacing between images and captions… and that level of precision left a lasting impression on me.”

He also gained early exposure to full-cycle research through work with Prof Chen’s group. “We went through failures and setbacks but ultimately created something we were proud of. That journey shaped how I approach problems today: breaking them down piece by piece, staying resilient, and never losing sight of the bigger picture.”

This August, Zerui will be pursuing graduate studies in robotics at the National University of Singapore (NUS). But his passion for robotics long predates his time at NTU. “Outside of NTU, I’ve spent nearly every school break returning to Shanghai to mentor high school students for the FIRST Robotics Competition (FRC). Even now, as I write this, I’m in the workshop with my team preparing for the China WRC competition happening in two days.”

“I believe that embodied intelligence, the intersection of AI and robotics, is the future. One day, robots will serve as the physical vessels of AI and play a central role in society. I’m particularly passionate about research at this intersection, especially in areas like intelligent planning and robot perception.”

As he takes the next step into robotics research, Gong Zerui carries with him a mindset shaped by doubt, persistence, and discovery, and a quiet conviction to keep building what’s next.