WIC Wuzhen 2026 Summit Opens with Focus on Open Artificial Intelligence

On October 31, Westlake University opened the World Models Research Center on its Yungu campus in Hangzhou. This center is an interdisciplinary, university-level research platform focused on physical intelligence.

The center will be led by Yu Kai-chen, who is an associate professor and scientific advisor at the university's School of Engineering. Furthermore, Yu Kai-chen is a co-founder and chief scientist at the AI company KMind. Jin Yaochu, a professor of artificial intelligence and head of the Department of Artificial Intelligence, has also been appointed as chief scientist, while several leading researchers will head specific research directions.

According to the university, the center's activities are aimed at transitioning artificial intelligence from language understanding to interaction with the physical world. The main focus will be on world models, as well as addressing what are considered key bottlenecks: how intelligent systems learn the laws of physics, predict environmental changes, and make decisions while interacting with them.

The plan includes studying systems that integrate perception, cognition, prediction, and action, as well as developing a general world model capable of understanding physics, predicting the consequences of actions, and continuously learning from real-world feedback. To achieve this goal, the center will attract researchers from various fields to connect fundamental theory, key technologies, and practical applications.

Yu received his bachelor's degree from the University of Hong Kong in 2016 and his Ph.D. from EPFL in 2021. He worked at Intel, Abacus.AI, and the DAMO Academy of Alibaba, where his work on BEVFusion for fusing LiDAR and camera data gained widespread recognition. After joining Westlake in 2023, he founded the Autonomous Intelligence Laboratory, known as AutoLab, to create world models for autonomous systems.

At the end of 2024, his team shifted from pixel-level generative world models towards a so-called conceptual world model, which represents physical concepts in an abstract latent space instead of rendering pixels. In January 2026, Yu spun off this research into a startup in Hangzhou called Awomo.

The university has not yet named other leading researchers or announced the center's initial projects.

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