🎵 About Me

Hello! My name is Mingyang Yao (姚铭洋). I am at my senior year of Mathematics-Computer Science and Cognitive Science at UCSD. I’m very interested in symbolic music generation and music information retrieval, exploring on processing of music in audio domain and multi-modality music model and focus on particularly how to design AI system that aligns with humans’ creative practice.

I was fortunate to be advised by wonderful mentor Ke Chen on my composer-conditioned symbolic music generation and symbolic chord recognition research. I was adviced by Professor Taylor Berg-Kirkpatrick for my chord recognition project as well. Outside my AI music interest, I also lead data analysis project in psychiatry and involve other data mining projects under mentorship of Professor Francesca Telese

I was also a instructional apprentice for Cogs 18 (Intro to Python) and grader for Math 154 (Discrete Math and Graph Theory) with and Math 20D (Intro to Differential Equation) and provide academic supports for over 300 students. I received 100% recommendation rate for Cogs 18 and excellent review from instructors.

I’m seeking PhD positions in AI Music area in any related department in Fall 2026.

🎓 Education

2022.09 - 2025.12 (expected), B.S. in Mathematics-Computer Science, UC San Diego.
2022.09 - 2025.12 (expected), B.S. in Cognitive Science (Machine Learning and Neural Computation) , UC San Diego.

📜 Publication

2025

From Generality to Mastery: Composer‑Style Symbolic Music Generation via Large‑Scale Pre‑training
Mingyang Yao, Ke Chen
AI Music Creativity 2025 (Oral)
paper, demo page, code
BACHI: Boundary-Aware Symbolic Chord Recognition Through Masked Iterative Decoding on Pop and Classical Music
Mingyang Yao, Ke Chen, Shlomo Dubnov, Taylor Berg-Kirkpatrick
ICASSP Under Review
paper, demo page, code
The development of FEDUPP: Feeding Experimentation Device Users Processing Package to Assess Learning and Cognitive Flexibility
Mingyang Yao^*, Avraham M Libster^* , Shane Desfor, Freiya Malhotra, Nathalia Castorena, Patricia Montilla-Perez, Francesca Telese
Journal Under Review
paper, code

💼 Research Experience

2023.09 - Present, Undergraduate Research Assistant, Telese Lab
2024.02 - 2025.04, Independent Research, Mentor: Ke Chen
2025.06 - 2025.09, Independent Research, Mentor: Ke Chen and Taylor Berg-Kirkpatrick

📚 Teaching Experience

2023.09 - 2023.12, Instructional Apprentice, Intro to Python (Cogs 18) with Professor Eric Morgan
2024.04 - 2024.06, Grader, Discrete Math and Graph Theory (Math 154) with Professor William Wesley
2024.09 - 2024.12, Grader, Intro to Differential Equations (Math 20D) with Professor Rishabh Dixit

🥇 Awards and Certificates

Chinese Musicians’ Association (CMA) Piano Graded Examination (Amateur), Level 10 Certificate, 2015
UCSD Provost Honor (2022-2025), 2022-2025
UCSD Health Student Research Assistant Summer Fellowship Provost Honor, 2024.08

Mingyang Yao