CS Talk - Changxi Zheng, Columbia University
Host: Julie Dorsey
Title: Audiovisual computing for virtual and tangible reality
Abstract:
Over the past decades, the success in the field of visual computing has revolutionized our digital experience — from special effects in Hollywood movies, face recognition on smartphones, to the stunning promise offered by VR/AR goggles. Yet, in this grand picture, one piece remains missing — the sound. Our real world has never been silent. Not only is it colorful to our eyes, its sound is also rich and vivid to our ears. In current paradigms, visual computing is often performed in isolation from its audio counterparts. In this talk, I will propose audiovisual computing, a research area that renders, analyzes, and processes audiovisual information. I will first introduce our recent work in the area of physics-based audiovisual models from first principles, and then illustrate audiovisual processing using our work on 360 videos. Then, I’ll discuss the implication of these models on improving the physical world: namely how to harness the computational audiovisual models to enable tangible forms and objects that offer unprecedented new functionalities.
Bio:
Changxi Zheng is currently an Associate Professor in the Computer Science Department at Columbia University. He received his Ph.D. from Cornell University with the Best Dissertation Award and his B.S. from Shanghai Jiaotong University. He served as an associated editor of ACM Transactions on Graphics. He was a Conference Chair for SCA in 2017, has won a NSF CAREER Award, and was named one of Forbes’ “30 under 30” in science and healthcare in 2013. He received the Best Paper Awards from 2016 SCA and 2017 UIST, among others. Changxi’s current research is on the boundary between computer science, applied physics and mathematics. He is particularly interested in developing simulation methods for complex physical systems, the computational models for optical and acoustic sensing, and the computational design of structures and materials. The technologies developed by his group have been used in several industries, and his work has been profiled in major media outlets, including NPR, BBC, Forbes, WIRED, Popular Science, and many others.