Chinese Government Award for postdoc Yingjun Du

Each year, the China Scholarship Council awards 50 Chinese PhD candidates or postdocs abroad with this prestigious grant. Yingjun Du receives a 10,000 USD stipend for his research on meta learning, an AI technique that teaches machines to learn with less and less data.

Du completed his PhD at the University of Amsterdam between June 2020 and November 2024 and has been a postdoctoral researcher in the Video & Image Sense (VIS) Lab of Prof. Cees Snoek since December 2024. His work focuses on meta learning, few-shot learning, and training AI systems with limited data.

With twelve first-author publications in top AI venues, Du's output is well above the norm—five such papers is already considered an excellent result for a PhD. He previously received a CISCO Research Gift of 50,000 USD in recognition of the impact of his research.

On 19 November 2025, Yingjun Du will defend his PhD thesis entitled Learning to Learn with Less and Less at the University of Amsterdam.

Read the full article on the University of Amsterdam website.