👋 About Me

Greetings! I am a Ph.D. candidate at UWaterloo, supervised by Amir Khajepour and Freda Shi. Before that, I received my M.A.Sc. degree in Mechanical and Mechatronics Engineering from the University of Waterloo. I earned my B.Sc. degree in Mechanical Engineering from The Pennsylvania State University.

My research interests include large language models in autonomous driving, and learning-based algorithms in autonomous driving.

Recently I am focusing on following topics:

• Applied Large Language Models in Autonomous Driving
  • More human-like, interpretable Decision-making
  • Safe Driving in dynamic environments considering social norms and interaction
• Learning-based Algorithms in Autonomous Driving
  • Trajectory/motion prediction
  • End-to-end planning

Feel free to reach out to me if you want to discuss any of these topics or interested in collaboration!

I am actively looking for research internship opportunities for Summer/Fall 2026 in Canada/US. If you believe I might be a good fit for your openings, feel free to reach out to me via email at s95huang [AT] uwaterloo.ca

Recent News

• 2025.05: I have received NSERC Postgraduate Scholarship – Doctoral (PGS D) and OGS/QEII-GSST.
• 2024.09: I have joined CompLING Lab, co-supervised by Prof. Freda Shi
• 2024.08: I have completed my comprehensive exam.
• 2024.07: 2 papers accepted to IEEE ITSC 2024, see you in Edmonton,ON, Canada.
• 2023.05: I have started my Ph.D. at MVSL lab, supervised by Prof. Amir Khajepour.

  📝 Selected Publications

Full publication list on Google Scholar

‡ indicates equal contribution.

• S. Huang, C. Sun, M. Ning, Y. Yang, C. Ma, J. Zhong, K. Shu, F. Shi, and A. Khajepour,
  “DriveLegal: Toward legally compliant driving via trustworthy hybrid retrieval-augmented LLMs,”
  Expert Systems with Applications, p. 131593, 2026.

• W. Ye, S. Huang, M. S. Herdem, W. Sun, J. Nathwani, and J. Z. Wen,
  “Transformer-based predictive energy management in hydrogen-integrated renewable systems,”
  Energy, p. 139474, 2025.

• S. Huang, F. Shi, C. Sun, J. Zhong, M. Ning, Y. Yang, Y. Lu, H. Wang, and A. Khajepour,
  “DriveSOTIF: Advancing SOTIF through multimodal large language models,”
  IEEE Transactions on Vehicular Technology, 2025.

• Y. Cui^‡, S. Huang^‡, J. Zhong^‡, Z. Liu, Y. Wang, C. Sun, B. Li, X. Wang, and A. Khajepour,
  “DriveLLM: Charting the path toward full autonomous driving with large language models,”
  IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Vehicles, vol. 9, no. 1, pp. 1450–1464, 2023.

• S. Huang and A. Khajepour,
  “A new adiabatic compressed air energy storage system based on a novel compression strategy,”
  Energy, vol. 242, p. 122883, 2022.

🎖 Honors and Awards

• 2025-Present, NSERC Postgraduate Scholarship – Doctoral, NSERC
• 2025-Present, President’s Graduate Scholarship, University of Waterloo
• 2025, OGS/QEII-GSST, Ontario, (declined)
• 2023-Present, Engineering Domestic Doctoral Student Award, University of Waterloo
• 2019, Engineering Domestic Graduate Scholarship, University of Waterloo

💬 Invited Talks

• 2024.12, Advancing perception sotif through multi-modal large language models, Tsinghua University, China

💻 Work Experience

• 2020.01 - 2024.03, CTO & Co-founder, LoopX Innovation Inc., Waterloo, ON, Canada. (My startup)
• 2020.11 - 2022.11, Autonomous system control engineer, Almon Equipment Ltd, Toronto, ON, Canada.

📚 Teaching Experience

• Spring 2019, Teaching Assistant, Robot Manipulators
• Fall 2019, Teaching Assistant, Fluid Power Control Systems