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Dianwei Chen

Ph.D. Candidate · Civil & Environmental Engineering · University of Maryland, College Park

CARLA · SUMO · ROS · PRGP

Dianwei Chen
Max with the M-Trail AV

About me

I build simulation and AI tools to make autonomous vehicles safer—especially when the road gets icy, the scenario gets messy, or the AI hits an edge case.

All models are wrong, but some are useful. — George Box
11
Publications
5
Published
6
Preprints
3
Universities

I'm Dianwei Chen, a Ph.D. candidate in Civil & Environmental Engineering at the University of Maryland, College Park, advised by Prof. Terry Yang. I'm part of the M-Trail Lab, where we work on cyberinfrastructure and digital twins for transportation. Before UMD, I received my M.S. in Electrical & Computer Engineering from The Ohio State University (with Prof. Keith Redmill and Prof. Umit Özgüner) and my B.E. from Zhejiang University.

My research sits at the intersection of reinforcement learning, digital twins, AV safety evaluation, and vision–language models. I focus on how to test and validate autonomous systems in conditions that are hard to replicate in the real world—winter weather, rare pedestrian behaviors, and safety-critical edge cases. To do that, I build and use high-fidelity simulation (e.g. CARLA–SUMO co-simulation), physics-informed models such as Physics Regularized Gaussian Processes (PRGP), and RL-based behavior models to stress-test AVs and find failure modes before they hit the road.

I also work on the bridge from simulation to deployment: I've contributed to ROS and Autoware integration on real test vehicles (including PCD mapping and trajectory planning) and care deeply about open-source, reproducible tools for the AV and smart-transportation community.

If you're interested in collaboration, internships, or just talking about safe autonomy and digital twins, feel free to reach out.

Research interests

  • Reinforcement Learning for AV control
  • Digital Twins & simulation
  • Autonomous Vehicle Safety
  • Vision Large Language Models
  • CARLA-SUMO co-simulation
  • Physics Regularized Gaussian Process (PRGP)
  • Pedestrian behavior & edge-case AV failures

Featured work

ICDCS · 2026 Network Digital Untwinning Backward optimization of digital twins — accepted at IEEE ICDCS 2026 (18.6% acceptance rate), Seoul. Survey · 2026 Digital Twins in ITCS: A Survey Six DT categories (SV-DT … ToT) for intelligent transportation and communication systems. VLM · 2025 INSIGHT Vision–language models for context-aware hazard detection and edge-case AV evaluation. RL · 2024 Deep RL for high-risk driving Longitudinal control and collision avoidance in challenging scenarios; TRB 2026.

Timeline

Education and research path.

  1. Undergraduate B.E., Zhejiang University Engineering foundation before graduate study in the U.S.
  2. Graduate · 2023 M.S. in Electrical & Computer Engineering, The Ohio State University Research with Prof. Keith Redmill and Prof. Umit Özgüner; thesis on deep RL and adversarial pedestrian modeling (IEEE IV 2023).
  3. Present Ph.D. in Civil & Environmental Engineering, University of Maryland M-Trail Lab, advised by Prof. Terry Yang — digital twins, AV safety, simulation (CARLA–SUMO), and vision–language models for edge-case evaluation.

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