Three NTU CCDS PhD Students Receive 2026 Google Fellowships

Three PhD students in NTU’s College of Computing and Data Science have received 2026 Google PhD Fellowships: Hu Zixuan, Chaoyue Song, and Peiqing Yang.

Google PhD Fellowship students, who are nominated by their universities, are a select group recognised by Google researchers and their institutions as some of the most promising young academics in the world. The Fellowships are awarded to students who represent the future of research in their field.

Hu Zixuan received a $20,000 2026 Southeast Asia PhD Fellowship in Machine Learning and ML Foundations to pursue further research on improving the reasoning capabilities, safety, and scalability of foundation models by exploring advanced machine learning principles.

“The fellowship will help me access the computational resources needed to extend this work to larger models and test my ideas at a greater scale,” said Hu. “It also gives me greater confidence and freedom to pursue challenging and longer-term questions that may take time to yield results.”

Hu is supervised by Tao Dacheng, a Distinguished University Professor in CCDS.

Chaoyue Song received a $10,000 2026 Southeast Asia PhD Fellowship in Machine Perception to support his work on generating dynamic worlds. Song studies interaction-preserving video reshooting, which is the task of re-rendering a captured video from new camera viewpoints while keeping the interactions in the scene intact and consistent in 3D. The longer-term goal is to synthesise interactive worlds where multiple objects move and interact under physical constraints, a key ingredient for embodied AI, spatial computing and digital twins.

“The fellowship tells me that the problem I have spent my PhD on, how to model and generate a world that moves, matters beyond my own lab,” said Song. “It also gives me the freedom to take on more ambitious, longer-horizon ideas without worrying as much about short-term results.”

Song is supervised by NTU CCDS Associate Professor Guosheng Lin as well as Dr. Fayao Liu of A*STAR.

Peiqing Yang also received a $10,000 2026 Southeast Asia PhD Fellowship in Machine Perception. The funds will support her work on human-centric visual content generation and editing, with the goal of making these systems more controllable, flexible and responsible. Yang plans to investigate multimodal controls that guide human appearance, behaviour, and interactions in generated images and videos. Yang will also explore semantic and physical layer decomposition to enable precise, targeted editing of people and their environments. A third focus of her work is developing human-centric evaluation methods to assess visual quality, identity preservation and ethical safety, including risks of inappropriate content and misuse.

“This fellowship resonates with my goal of developing visual AI that not only advances technical capabilities but also gives people more intuitive and trustworthy tools for creative expression,” said Yang. “Receiving this fellowship is a meaningful milestone in my PhD journey and a recognition of the research I have pursued so far.”

Yang is supervised by Chen Change Loy, the Tan Lip-Bu Professor in Artificial Intelligence (AI), deputy director of the AI-for-X Centre, and co-associate director of the S-Lab for Advanced Intelligence.