ICON Lab @ Columbia
We embed intelligence and advance automation in the life-cycle of design, construction and maintenance of civil infrastructure.
We are part of CAIL - Columbia Core AI Lab, focusing on robotics and physical AI.
If you're a Columbia student interested in working with us, please email Zhengbo with the subject line "Columbia student research request - YOUR NAME". If you're a prospective PhD student, please apply directly to the corresponding program and select Zhengbo as your preferred advisor in your application.
[09/2026] EgoAction: a real-world construction action recognition dataset built upon Ego4D. It focuses on fine-grained construction worker actions captured from an egocentric perspective.
[02/2026] ICON Pose: the first open dataset with 1,387 egocentric images and corresponding 2D construction worker poses across 63 action types.
[10/2025] ConstructionSite 10K: the first dataset containing 10k construction site images developed to test how vision language models (VLMs) can understand construction site images for image captioning, visual grounding, and safety rule violation VQA.
[06/2025] Indoor FireRescue Radar: the first 4D Indoor Millimeter Wave Dataset for Hazardous Environment Perception.
[10/2026] Zhengbo gives a talk at the seminar series of the Lyles School of Civil and Construction Engineering at Purdue University.
[10/2026] Zhengbo delivers keynote titled "Two years to build, fifty to maintain" at the 2026 Northeast Robotics Colloquium (NERC) at Princeton University.
[09/2026] Our work IRL4IDM led by Lei Huang is on the must read list for IROS 2026 by Dr. Glen Berseth.
[09/2026] Zhengbo co-organizes the 5th Workshop on Future of Construction: Collaborative Robots for Fabrication, Manufacturing, and Inspection at 2026 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS 2026).
[08/2026] Zhengbo serves as the Poster and Demo Chair for the ACM International Conference on Systems for Energy-Efficient Buildings, Cities, and Transportation (BuildSys 2027).
[08/2026] ICON hosts four high school students, Julien Baltrusaitis, Sophia Kadian, Benjamin Otto, and Seraphine Penso, through the CS3 track of Columbia Engineering's Engineering the Next Generation (ENG) summer research program.
[04/2026] Rachel won first place in ConTech Alliance Hackathon 2026! Congrats Rachel!
[03/2026] Zhengbo joins the Technical Program Committee for the ACM International Conference on Systems for Energy-Efficient Buildings, Cities, and Transportation (BuildSys 2026).
[03/2026] Zhengbo serves as the Area Chair for the 43rd International Symposium on Automation and Robotics in Construction (ISARC 2026). Track: Automated/robotic machines, devices, and end-effectors.
[11/2025] Zhengbo serves as the PhD Forum Co-Chair for the ACM International Conference on Systems for Energy-Efficient Buildings, Cities, and Transportation (BuildSys 2025).
[11/2025] Zhengbo delivers talk at Stony Brook University, Department of Civil Engineering Seminar Series.
[09/2025] Kangkang successfully defended his PhD in Civil Engineering at UBC! Congrats Kangkang!
[05/2025] Zhengbo elected as the Member-at-large of VIMS committee ASCE.
[05/2025] Our work Egocentric camera-based method for detecting static hazardous objects on construction sites wins the best dataset award at the 2025 i3CE Data Challenge.
[01/2025] Zhengbo serves as the Area Chair for the 42nd International Symposium on Automation and Robotics in Construction (ISARC 2025). Track: Automated/robotic machines, devices, and end-effectors.
Bold: PI Underline: ICON students
We are active members of the following research communities: