Staff profile

Yang is an Associate Professor of Hybrid Intelligence in the Department of Computer Science at Durham University and Director of the Hybrid Intelligence Lab. His current work focuses on building hybrid intelligence systems in which humans, AI agents, and the physical world can perceive, learn, reason, and act together. Rather than treating AI as an isolated model, his research investigates intelligence as a complete system — spanning multimodal perception and human understanding, foundation and generative models, autonomous agents, edge and physical AI, and real-world deployment. At Durham, he is developing the Hybrid Intelligence Lab as a platform connecting fundamental AI research with healthcare, industry and other real-world environments. His current research programme brings together researchers, doctoral students, industrial partners and international collaborators to explore how increasingly autonomous AI systems can remain trustworthy, adaptive and useful when operating in complex human and physical environments. Alongside his research, he leads postgraduate research development in Computer Science, with a particular focus on doctoral talent development, international collaboration, research culture and new pathways connecting PhD research with academic, industrial and entrepreneurial impact. Across these activities, his current goal is to build the people, research, infrastructure and partnerships required for the next generation of Hybrid Intelligence.