Qianyi Deng

Piggy Robotics (YC F25) is building mass-producible humanoid robots powered by artificial muscles that do your chores at iPhone prices. We built a full-size humanoid in just 2 months for under $1,000, using our proprietary muscles, valves, and pumps.

Taught software development, database design courses to top executives from Google, Microsoft, Meta, UBS, NASA and other top technology companies.

Developed a non-autoregressive transformer model for entity-level image editing.

Improved multilingual OCR and handwriting recognition with 10M+ labeled images and advanced vision models, achieving 95% accuracy/95.5% recall in Korean OCR and reducing English handwriting CER to 6.3% and WER to 19.6%.

At age 13, co-founded Youda Outdoor Adventure Co., built the largest laser tag arena and quad bike center in Hunan.

Led STEM outreach through hands-on coding and robotics workshops, and delivered AI assemblies to 191 high school girls and teachers—sparking interest in STEM and driving a 37% increase in A-level Mathematics and Further Mathematics applications.

I led educational sessions in Nepal, teaching Mathematics, Chinese, and English to 45+ orphans. By bridging cultures and emphasizing real-life applications of knowledge, I gained early leadership experience and a lasting commitment to education and social impact.

- Supervisors: Professor Niki Trigoni FREng & Professor Andrew Markham  - Research Interests: Multi-Sensor Systems, 3D Human Pose Estimation

- Distinction (average module mark: 85.26) - Thesis title: Stochastic Multi-Armed Bandits With Zero-Variance Control Variates (thesis mark:77.94) - Relevant modules: Data Science, Applied Bayesian Methods, Time Series, Machine Learning, NLP, and Reinforcement Learning

- First Class Honours - Relevant modules: Linear Algebra, Calculus, Probability and Statistics, Regression Analysis, Linear Models, Non-parametric Regression, Time Series Analysis, and Decision Tree - Summer exchanges: University of Hong Kong (2018); Tsinghua University (2017, Global Summer Exchange Scholarship £400) - Awards: King's Leadership and Professional Skills Award 2018/19, King's Cultural Experience Award 2018/19