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Staff profile

Overview

Yueqianji Chen

Biography

Yueqianji Chen is a PhD researcher in the Department of Computer Science at Durham University, supervised by Professor Paolo Remagnino (Computer Science) and Dr Jo Hepworth (Biosciences), with Dr Ankush Prashar (Newcastle University) as external advisor. His doctoral research is funded by the China Scholarship Council–Durham University Joint PhD Scholarship.

His PhD project, Trustworthy Biosurveillance, develops LLM-orchestrated teams of UAVs that pair broad aerial screening with targeted in-field molecular diagnostics (LAMP). The work combines Bayesian belief tracking, verifiable planning and runtime assurance, so that language-model-driven autonomy stays safe, auditable and grounded in evidence.

Before his PhD, Yueqianji completed the Master of Data Science at Durham with Distinction, winning the MDS Dissertation Prize for multimodal deep learning on Brassica napus growth. That work grew into ST-DETrack, a spatiotemporal tracker that follows individual branches through entangled oilseed rape canopies, developed with collaborators at Aberystwyth University. He has also worked as a research assistant at Peking University’s School of Psychological and Cognitive Sciences, where he built Bayesian and neural models of how adolescents update moral impressions.

Research interests

  • LLM agents and multi-agent planning
  • Spatiotemporal computer vision and plant phenotyping
  • Computational and Bayesian models of social cognition

Esteem Indicators

  • 2026: China Scholarship Council–Durham University Joint PhD Scholarship: Fully funded 48-month PhD scholarship jointly awarded by the China Scholarship Council and Durham University.
  • 2025 - 2025: MDS Dissertation Prize, Durham University: Awarded for outstanding achievement in the Master of Data Science research project.

Publications

Journal Article