I am a postdoctoral fellow in VITA group in University of Texas at Austin (UT Austin), working with Prof. Zhangyang Wang and Prof. Georgios Pavlakos.
My research aims to build human-centered AI systems that treat human communication and interaction as first-class capabilities, grounded in embodiment and real-world context, enabling physically and socially meaningful interactions between people and AI. This vision has translated into sustained real-world deployments for Deaf communities.
In parallel, I have deeply engaged in education and outreach.
We present a new task, i.e., hand-object interaction image generation. This task is challenging and research-worthy in many potential application scenarios, such as online shopping.
The first self-supervised pre-training framework in isolated SLR. It conducts masked modeling with hand-prior incorporated for better capturing context in the sign language domain.
The first dataset explicitly exploring the importance of non-manual features in sign language.
Impact & Outreach
Deaf-facing deployment: Our sign-language foundation models support real-world interactions in public services and robotics.
K-12 education: Co-authored an AI textbook series adopted nationwide, distributed across 500+ schools and reaching 300,000+ students.
Academic Services
I serve as Area Chair (AC) for International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP) and have reviewed the following Journals and Conferences:
IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR)
International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV)
European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV)
Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS)
International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR)
International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML)
AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI)
ACM International Conference on Multimedia (ACM MM)
International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI)
IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (TPAMI)
International Journal of Computer Vision (IJCV)
IEEE Transactions on Multimedia (TMM)
IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems for Video Technology (TCSVT)
ACM Transactions on Multimedia Computing, Communications, and Applications (TOMM)
I am happy to serve as a reviewer. Please feel free to contact me.
