Professor Yu received his PhD degree in computer science from University of California, Berkeley in 2000. He also holds a MS degree in applied mathematics and a BE degree in computer science and engineering from Zhejiang University. He was a tenured faculty member at University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign from 2006 to 2012, and a tenure-track faculty member there from 2000 to 2006. He is an ACM Fellow and IEEE Fellow.

Professor Yu has made significant contributions to AI and visual computing, including computer vision, images and graphics. He has been named 2022 World's Top 2% Scientists by Stanford University, and is a recipient of 2019 1st-Class Science and Technology Award from China Society of Image and Graphics (CSIG), ACCV 2018 Best Application Paper Award, ACM SCA 2011 and 2005 Best Paper Awards, 2002 US National Science Foundation CAREER Award, and 1998 Microsoft Graduate Fellowship. Innovative technologies co-invented by him has been frequently adopted by the film and healthcare industries. His current research interests include artificial intelligence, AI generated content, AI for medicine and computer vision.

Professor Yu has been an associate editor of many international journals, including IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, IEEE Transactions on Image Processing, IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, Intelligent Medicine, and The Visual Computer. He has been a conference chair of 2017 International Conference on Machine Vision and Information Technology and 3rd Asia Conference on Machine Learning and Computing, and a program chair of Computational Visual Media 2017, Computer Animation and Social Agents 2012 and Pacific Graphics 2009. He has served on the program committee of many leading international conferences, including CVPR, ICCV, SIGGRAPH, and SIGGRAPH Asia.