We are an inter-disciplinary team of researchers working in visual computing, in particular, computer graphics and computer vision. Current areas of focus include 3D and robotic vision, 3D printing and content creation, animation, AR/VR, geometric and image-based modelling, machine learning, natural phenomenon, and shape analysis. Our research works frequently appear in top venues such as SIGGRAPH, CVPR, and ICCV (we rank #12 in the world in terms of top publications in visual computing, as of 1/2018) and we collaborate widely with the industry and academia (e.g., Adobe Research, Google, MSRA, Princeton, Stanford, and Washington). Our faculty and students have won numerous honours and awards, including FRSC, Alain Fournier Best Thesis Award, Google Faculty Award, TR35@Singapore, NSERC Discovery Accelerator, and six best paper awards from ECCV, SCA, SGP, etc. Gruvi alumni went on to take up faculty positions in Canada, the US, and Asia, while others now work at companies including Apple, EA, Facebook, Google, IBM, and Microsoft.
October 2, 2018
GrUVi members co-author five technical papers at SIGGRAPH Asia 2018, which will be held at Tokyo in December 4-7. In particular, Wallace, Shuhua, Akshay, Manyi, Ali, and Han all got their very first SIG papers! The papers cover topics in fabrication, machine learning, shape and scene modeling, NLP, and even a fun (fabricable) puzzle! The papers are: “Language-Driven Synthesis of 3D Scenes Using Scene Databases”, “Construction and Fabrication of Reversible Shape Transforms”, “Fabricable Eulerian Wires for 3D Shape Abstraction”, “SCORES: Shape Composition with Recursive Substructure Priors”, and “3D Fabrication with Universal Building Blocks and Pyramidal Shells”. Congratulations to all authors!
October 2, 2018
GrUVi members co-author five technical papers at SIGGRAPH Asia 2018, which will be held at Tokyo in December 4-7. In particular, Wallace, Shuhua, Akshay, Manyi, Ali, and Han all got their very first SIG papers! The papers cover topics in fabrication, machine learning, shape and scene modeling, NLP, and even a fun (fabricable) puzzle! The papers are: “Language-Driven Synthesis of 3D Scenes Using Scene Databases”, “Construction and Fabrication of Reversible Shape Transforms”, “Fabricable Eulerian Wires for 3D Shape Abstraction”, “SCORES: Shape Composition with Recursive Substructure Priors”, and “3D Fabrication with Universal Building Blocks and Pyramidal Shells”. Congratulations to all authors!
August 23, 2018
Two gruviers were student volunteers (SV) at the SIGGRAPH 2018 conference. While the attendees were certainly thankful for all the work that all the volunteers put in the event, our gruvi volunteers described how valuable the experience was for them! Zhiqin got the chance to use the hardware available at the exhibition hall to print the awesome gruvi logo on the hat shown in the picture. He described the great impact that experiencing the latest developments on VR technology had on him:
“I’m honored to be a student volunteer of such a great conference. VR was definitely a highlight of SIGGRAPH 2018. There were many showcases of applying haptic technology to VR and utilizing VR for designing and creating content. The immersive pavilion was awesome and provided me all kinds of VR experiences. I am looking forward to next SIGGRAPH!”
Akshay, on the other hand, emphasized the connections he was able to forge during his time as a volunteer:
“This was my first SIGGRAPH and my first time as a SIG-SV. The kind of atmosphere, the exuberance of energy and experience that I felt was surreal and I was left wanting for more when it ended. Memories of a lifetime with awesome fellow SV’s, coordinating various programs and above all, the latest technology!! Definitely want to relive this again at SIG’19.”
August 23, 2018
Two gruviers were student volunteers (SV) at the SIGGRAPH 2018 conference. While the attendees were certainly thankful for all the work that all the volunteers put in the event, our gruvi volunteers described how valuable the experience was for them! Zhiqin got the chance to use the hardware available at the exhibition hall to print the awesome gruvi logo on the hat shown in the picture. He described the great impact that experiencing the latest developments on VR technology had on him: “I’m honored to be a student volunteer of such a great conference. VR was definitely a highlight of SIGGRAPH 2018. There were many showcases of applying haptic technology to VR and utilizing VR for designing and creating content. The immersive pavilion was awesome and provided me all kinds of VR experiences. I am looking forward to next SIGGRAPH!”Akshay, on the other hand, emphasized the connections he was able to forge during his time as a volunteer:”This was my first SIGGRAPH and my first time as a SIG-SV. The kind of atmosphere, the exuberance of energy and experience that I felt was surreal and I was left wanting for more when it ended. Memories of a lifetime with awesome fellow SV’s, coordinating various programs and above all, the latest technology!! Definitely want to relive this again at SIG’19.”
August 21, 2018
SIGGRAPH 2018 was held in Vancouver from August 12 to 16, at the Vancouver Convention Centre. The majority of GrUVi members attended the conference, some as paper presenters and some as student volunteers. This year, the lab contributed four papers that were presented in the Technical Papers program. Ali presented his paper on semi-supervised analysis of 3D shape styles and Kangxue presented his paper on P2P-NET, both on Thursday, in the paper session on Shape Analysis. Also notably, long-term collaborator with GrUVi and adjunct professor with the SFU School of Computing Science, Prof. Daniel Cohen-Or, is featured as the annual SIGGRAPH Achievement Award winner. Danny has been collaborating with Richard Zhang and students in the lab since 2008!
August 21, 2018
SIGGRAPH 2018 was held in Vancouver from August 12 to 16, at the Vancouver Convention Centre. The majority of GrUVi members attended the conference, some as paper presenters and some as student volunteers. This year, the lab contributed four papers that were presented in the Technical Papers program. Ali presented his paper on semi-supervised analysis of 3D shape styles and Kangxue presented his paper on P2P-NET, both on Thursday, in the paper session on Shape Analysis. Also notably, long-term collaborator with GrUVi and adjunct professor with the SFU School of Computing Science, Prof. Daniel Cohen-Or, is featured as the annual SIGGRAPH Achievement Award winner. Danny has been collaborating with Richard Zhang and students in the lab since 2008!
August 21, 2018
A special event honouring Professor Eugene Fiume, on the occasion of his 60-th birthday, was held at the SFU Harbour Center on August 17, right after SIGGRAPH 2018. Many of Eugene’s first-generation PhDs from the University of Toronto attended the celebratory workshop and gave their account of fun and inspiring stories about what it was like to be his graduate students. Eugene’s computer graphics instructor during his undergraduate years at the University of Waterloo provided hint of how Eugene was already “ahead of the class” then. The event featured Prof. Pat Hanrahan from Stanford University, as the keynote speaker. Pat spoke of “theory vs. practice” to highlight how over the years, Eugene has been among the rare group of people in computer graphics, who have emphasized the importance of theory in the field.
August 21, 2018
A special event honouring Professor Eugene Fiume, on the occasion of his 60-th birthday, was held at the SFU Harbour Center on August 17, right after SIGGRAPH 2018. Many of Eugene’s first-generation PhDs from the University of Toronto attended the celebratory workshop and gave their account of fun and inspiring stories about what it was like to be his graduate students. Eugene’s computer graphics instructor during his undergraduate years at the University of Waterloo provided hint of how Eugene was already “ahead of the class” then. The event featured Prof. Pat Hanrahan from Stanford University, as the keynote speaker. Pat spoke of “theory vs. practice” to highlight how over the years, Eugene has been among the rare group of people in computer graphics, who have emphasized the importance of theory in the field.
July 22, 2018
Congratulations to all SFU researchers that were able to have an impressive count of 12 papers accepted at the European Conference on Computer Vision 2018 (ECCV 2018)! ECCV is considered, together with ICCV and CVPR, one of the top level conferences in computer vision. Here is the full list of accepted papers with SFU co-authors:
●"Hierarchical Relational Networks for Group Activity Recognition and Retrieval" by Mostafa Ibrahim*, Simon Fraser University; Greg Mori, Simon Fraser University;
●"Neural Procedural Reconstruction for Residential Buildings" by Huayi Zeng*, Washington University in St.Louis; Jiaye Wu, Washington University in St.Louis; Yasutaka Furukawa, Simon Fraser University;
●"IM2Hand3D: Leveraging Multi-task Network for 3D Hand Pose Estimation from a Color Image" by Xiaoming Deng*, Chinese Academy of Sciences; Wenyong Zheng, Chinese Academy of Sciences ; Yinda Zhang, Princeton University; Jian Shi, Chinese Academy of Sciences ; Ping Tan, Simon Fraser University; Liang Chang, Beijing Normal University; Yuying Zhu, Chinese Academy of Sciences;
●"FloorNet: A Unified Framework for Floorplan Reconstruction from 3D Scans" by Chen Liu*, Washington University in St. Louis; Jiaye Wu, Washington University in St.Louis; Yasutaka Furukawa, Simon Fraser University;
●"Probabilistic Video Generation using Holistic Attribute Control" by Jiawei He*, Simon Fraser University; Andreas Lehrmann, Facebook; Joe Marino, California Institute of Technology; Greg Mori, Simon Fraser University; Leonid Sigal, University of British Columbia;
●"Constraints Matter in Deep Neural Network Compression" by Changan Chen, Simon Fraser University; Fred Tung*, Simon Fraser University; Naveen Vedula, Simon Fraser University; Greg Mori, Simon Fraser University;
●"Characterize Adversarial Examples Based on Spatial Consistency Information for Semantic Segmentation" by CHAOWEI XIAO, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor; Ruizhi Deng, Simon Fraser University; Bo Li*, University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign; Fisher Yu, UC Berkeley; mingyan liu, university of Michigan, Ann Arbor; Dawn Song, UC Berkeley;
●"Faces as Lighting Probes via Unsupervised Deep Highlight Extraction" by Renjiao Yi*, Simon Fraser University; Chenyang Zhu, Simon Fraser University; Ping Tan, Simon Fraser University; Stephen Lin, Microsoft Research;
●"Sparsely Aggregated Convolutional Networks" by Ligeng Zhu*, Simon Fraser University; Ruizhi Deng, Simon Fraser University; Michael Maire, Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago; Zhiwei Deng, Simon Fraser University; Greg Mori, Simon Fraser University; Ping Tan, Simon Fraser University;
●"RIDI: Robust IMU Double Integration" by Hang Yan*, Washington University in St. Louis; Qi Shan, Zillow Group; Yasutaka Furukawa, Simon Fraser University;
●"Object Level Visual Reasoning in Videos" by Fabien Baradel, LIRIS; Natalia Neverova*, Facebook AI Research; Christian Wolf, INSA Lyon, France; Julien Mille, INSA Centre Val de Loire; Greg Mori, Simon Fraser University.
●"SketchyScene: Richly-Annotated Scene Sketches" by Changqing Zou*, University of Maryland (UMD); Qian Yu, Queen Mary University of London; Ruofei Du, UMD; Haoran Mo, sun yat sen university; Yi-Zhe Song, Queen Mary University of London; Tao Xiang, Queen Mary, University of London, UK; Chengying Gao, sun yat sen university; Baoquan Chen, Shandong University; Hao Zhang, SFU.
May 18, 2018
GrUVi welcomes three new visiting students this summer: Manas Bhargave, IIT Bombay undergrad and visiting under MITACS-IIT; Ruiqi Ni, an undergrad student from University of Science and Technology (USTC) China and Chen Song, SFU-ZJU DDP student under USRA.
Welcome to GrUVi!
May 17, 2018
Three papers co-authored by GrUVi members have been accepted at SIGGRAPH 2018: P2P-NET: Bidirectional Point Displacement Net for Shape Transform, Predictive and Generative Neural Networks for Object Functionality, and DSCarver: Decompose-and-Spiral-Carve for Subtractive Manufacturing. P2P-NET was first-authored by GrUVi's PhD student Kangxue Yin. For more details, please visit the publications page.
May 16, 2018
Richard and Ping give talks at "Third SFU-ZJU Joint Symposium on Big Data and Visual Computing". The Third Joint Symposium on Big Data and Visual Computing Research is a forum where researchers and students from the two universities will meet, exchange ideas, and explore opportunities.
April 12, 2018
Congrats to Kangkang who has received a NSERC Discovery Accelerator Supplement (DAS) for 2018. Each year 125 applicants to NSERC Discovery grants receive this award, which comes with $40K per year for three years on top of a Discovery Grant award!
The DAS Program provides substantial and timely resources to researchers who have a superior research program that is highly rated in terms of originality and innovation, and who show strong potential to become international leaders within their field. Furthermore, the Discovery Grants Program prioritizes research with long-term goals and recognizes the creativity and innovation that are at the heart of all research advances.
Well done Kangkang!
April 10, 2018
Congrats to Yasu who has received an Outstanding Young CS Researcher Award for 2017.
These prizes recognize excellence in research, and are made to top young faculty members in Canadian Computer Science Departments/Schools/Faculties who are within the first 10 years of their career beyond the completion of their PhD.
Well done Yasu!
April 8, 2018
Graphics Interface 2018 (GI'18) will be held in York University, May 8-11. Two of our GrUVi alumni, Oliver van Kaick and Andrea Tagliasacchi, are invited speakers on the program!
Graphics Interface is an annual international conference devoted to computer graphics and human-computer interaction (HCI). GI is the longest running conference in the field (the first conference was held in 1969), consistently attracting high-quality submissions from graphics, HCI, as well as visualization.
February 23, 2018
GrUVi congratulates Yasu Furukawa, who received a Google Research Award in the current cycle! Yasu's project is titled "Automatic Floorplan Generation from Tango", and is valued at $43,000 (USD). The works funded through Google Research Awards tend to have a high impact, since research results are often published at top conferences and in top publications in Computer Science.
Well done Yasu!
October 13, 2017
GrUVi members co-author two technical papers: "Learning to Predict Part Mobility from a Single Static Snapshot" and "Learning to Group Discrete Graphical Patterns"; and one course at SIGGRAPH Asia 2017, to be held in Bangkok, Thailand, November 27-30. At ICCV 2017, three papers co-authored by GrUVi members have been presented.
