Laura Yao - PhD Student, UNC Chapel Hill

Bio

I am a first-year PhD student in the UNITES lab at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. My research interests include multimodal learning, LLMs, and AI4Science.

Currently working under the supervision of Prof. Tianlong Chen at UNC. I have previously worked with Prof. Chenyan Xiong and Prof. Florian Metze at CMU during undergrad.

CV

PhD in Computer Science

2025 - Present

University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

Working in the UNITES Lab advised by Prof. Tianlong Chen

Software Engineer at Databricks

2024 - 2025

Network Control Plane Team

Working on multi-cloud networking infrastructure

BSc in Computer Science

2020 - 2023

Carnegie Mellon University

Dean's List with High Honors

Download Full CV

Publications

Audio-journey: Open domain latent diffusion based text-to-audio generation

J Michaels, JB Li, L Yao, L Yu, Z Wood-Doughty, F Metze

ICASSP 2024

Paper

Audio-journey: Efficient visual+ llm-aided audio encodec diffusion

JB Li, JS Michaels, L Yao, L Yu, Z Wood-Doughty, F Metze

Workshop on Efficient Systems for Foundation Models @ ICML2023

Paper

CMU-VIDION: Modified BLIP with Audio for Video to Text Description

L Yao, JB Li, F Metze

TRECVID Workshop 2022

Paper

"It is the Future": Exploring Parent Perspectives of CS Education

J Solyst, L Yao, A Axon, A Ogan

SIGCSE 2022

Paper