The researchers who make up the AIR Lab, past and present.
Zhiyao Duan is the PI of the AIR lab. He is a professor in Electrical and Computer Engineering, Computer Science, and Sound Arts and Engineering at the University of Rochester. He is the Director of NYS Center of Excellence in Data Science and Artificial Intelligence (CoE-DSAI). He was the President of the International Society for Music Information Retrieval (ISMIR) in 2024-2025. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Northwestern University in 2013, an M.S. in Control Science and Engineering from Tsinghua University in 2008, and a B.S. in Automation from Tsinghua University in 2004. He loves music, reading, and traveling.
Anastasia earned her PhD from Luddy School of Informatics, Computing and Engineering, Indiana University in 2026. Her work focuses on optimizing speech and audio deep learning systems through neural codecs and discrete representations. With a background that bridges academia and industry, she has contributed to a broad range of technologies, including speech recognition, speech enhancement, coding, and multi-channel audio. An avid climber and weightlifter, Anastasia brings the same discipline to her research as she does to her fitness.
Frank Cwitkowitz was enrolled in 2019 as a Ph.D. student in the Electrical and Computer Engineering department. He received his Bachelor's and Master's degree in Computer Engineering from the Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) in 2019. His research interests lie at the intersection of music information retrieval and machine learning, with a particular emphasis on problems surrounding automatic music transcription. He is also an NRT AR/VR Ph.D. training program fellow, and has completed international research internships at Chordify, Yousician, and Sony. Outside of research, he enjoys training martial arts, practicing guitar, being outdoors, reading, and more.
Moji Heydari was enrolled in 2019 as a Ph.D. student in the Electrical and Computer Engineering department. He received his M.S degree in Audio Engineering, focusing on automatic music emotion recognition from IRIBU in 2018 and a B.S in electrical engineering from Shahid Beheshti University in 2015. He has created a band of 3 human-sized musician robots in his B.S period, a guitarist, a keyboard player, and a tar player robot. His research interests include musician robots, music information retrieval, human-computer interaction, and deep learning. He composes and produces music, plays guitar, and sings in a local rock and roll band. In addition, he likes workouts, podcasts, and nature. Since March 2025, Moji has been working full time at Apple as a Machine Learning Scientist.
Huiran Yu was enrolled in 2023 as a Ph.D. student in the Electrical and Computer Engineering department. She received B.Eng. degree in Computer Science and Technology from Tsinghua University in 2020, and M.S. in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University in 2022. Before joining AIR lab, she has academic and industrial experience in singing voice synthesis, automatic pitch correction, and music generation. Her present research interests are in music transcription and automatic music structure analysis. She enjoys playing piano and singing in spare time.
Xingjian Du was enrolled in 2024 as a Ph.D. student in the Electrical and Computer Engineering department at the University of Rochester. He received his B.S. in Computer Science from Shanghai University in 2019. Before joining University of Rochester, he led the development of music retrieval systems at ByteDance AI Lab and conducted various research in MIR. His research interests include music information retrieval, audio processing, and deep learning applications in music understanding and generation.
Stella was enrolled in 2024 as a Ph.D. student in the Electrical and Computer Engineering department, working with Professor Zhiyao Duan. Her research focuses on music information retrieval and multimedia datasets. She previously worked as a software engineer and holds degrees in English and Global Health from Harvard, an MFA in Poetry from the Iowa Writers' Workshop, and an MA in Data Science from Columbia. Stella has written two books and is currently working on her next collection.
Baotong was enrolled in 2024 as a Ph.D. student in the Electrical and Computer Engineering department. He received B.Eng. degree in Automation from Tsinghua University in 2024. His research interests include speech processing, music generation, and music information retrieval. He plays the guitar and loves composing and producing music in his free time.
Ryan was enrolled in 2025 as a Ph.D. student in the Computer Science department. He got his BS in computer science at Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology, and worked for a year as a student researcher at Los Alamos National Lab. His current research focus is on active acoustic control. In his free time, he enjoys running, rowing, and swimming.
Mingyang Yao joined the University of Rochester in 2026 as a Ph.D. student in the Electrical and Computer Engineering department. He received B.S. degrees in Mathematics–Computer Science and Cognitive Science specialized in Neural Computation and Machine Learning at the University of California, San Diego in 2025. His research interests lie in music information retrieval, music generation, and music representation learning. He enjoys playing the piano and reading novels besides working.
With immediate position after graduation.