Heesup Yun

Heesup Yun

Postdoctoral Researcher
Department of Biological and Agricultural Engineering
University of California, Davis

hspyun [at] ucdavis [dot] edu CV Google Scholar LinkedIn

I am a postdoctoral researcher at UC Davis working on sensing and robotics for agriculture. My projects include field robots and UAVs, low-cost thermal imaging, and plant models built from images with 3D simulation and vision language models. I received my Ph.D. in Biological Systems Engineering from UC Davis, advised by J. Mason Earles. Before that, I worked for four and a half years as a software engineer at A.I.MATICS on computer vision for driver monitoring, and studied biosystems engineering at Seoul National University.

See Research and Publications for details.

News

• Oct 2026Collaborated with Hamid Kamangir on a paper probing Earth foundation models for intra-field crop yield forecasting, accepted to the NeurIPS 2026 Workshop on Representation Learning for Earth Observation (REO2).
• Aug 2026Started as a Postdoctoral Researcher at UC Davis.
• Jul 2026Presented our work on generating plant simulation configurations with vision language models at the ASABE Annual International Meeting in Indianapolis.
• Jul 2026The UC Davis undergraduate team I advised during my Ph.D. competed at the ASABE 2026 Student Robotics Challenge.
• Jun 2026Completed my Ph.D. in Biological Systems Engineering at UC Davis (dissertation).
• Jun 2026Received the Teaching Assistant Excellence Award, UC Davis College of Engineering.
• May 2025Won 1st place at the AIFS × Sony AI AgTech Challenge with WeedTrackr.
• May 2023Our team received the Elegance in Design Prize at the Farm Robotics Challenge for Robo-ag, a GPS-guided targeted spray robot for vineyards (UC ANR news).

Selected Publications

• Yun, H., Uyehara, I. K., Droutsas, I., Ranario, E., Diepenbrock, C. H., Bailey, B. N., & Earles, J. M. (2026). A vision language model for generating XML-based organ-level plant architecture representations of cowpea from simulated images. Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence, 9, 1844338. doiarXivcodedataproject
• Yun, H., Uyehara, I. K., Ranario, E., Lundqvist, L., Diepenbrock, C. H., Bailey, B. N., & Earles, J. M. (2026). Using Vision Language Foundation Models to Generate Plant Simulation Configurations via In-Context Learning. arXiv preprint arXiv:2603.08930. arXivcodedataproject
• Yun, H., Lo, S., Diepenbrock, C. H., Bailey, B. N., & Earles, J. M. (2024). VisTA-SR: Improving the Accuracy and Resolution of Low-Cost Thermal Imaging Cameras for Agriculture. In Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Workshops, Agriculture-Vision Workshop (pp. 5470–5479). pdfcodedataproject

All publications