ChinAI #273: An Ethnic Chinese History of Computer Vision (part 2)
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Feature Translation: An Ethnic Chinese History of Computer Vision (part 1)
Context: Our story last week started back in 1988, when Long Quan, a Chinese international student in France, got his paper accepted at the second ever International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV). We followed his path to Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST), where he set up the VisGraph computer vision lab. In the second half of this longform history (link to original Chinese), the narrative shifts to Long’s students and their career trajectories.
Key Passages: Long Quan led his team of students to develop a new method of image-based 3D modeling, which extracted 3D information from images and simplified the modeling process (so you didn’t have to manually drag things around in 3D graphics software).
“In 2005, the first work of the HKUST vision lab on IBM was published at the top computer graphics conference SIGGRAPH, and the modeling object was hair. In 2006, Long Quan's team published research on modeling plant objects,” the article reads.
As the Google scholar screenshots show below, the lab’s work gradually expanded from modeling hair and plants to buildings and cities: “Nowadays, high-precision maps in the field of autonomous driving, building and street modeling in smart cities, and other technologies are mature, and much of the work is a continuation of the work of Long Quan's team at that time.”
At this point VisGraph’s growth intersects with Microsoft Research Asia (MSRA), based in Beijing. From the article: “Thanks to the close connections between Long Quan and Harry Shum and MSRA, many of Long Quan's students also joined MSRA for internships during their doctoral studies and became ‘dual-city residents’ that flew between Beijing and Hong Kong.”
That initial project on hair modeling was led by Yichen Wei, who interned at MSRA and eventually worked there for 12 years (after finishing his doctorate at HKUST). His work formed the basis for many Microsoft products, including Xbox Kinect. After that, Wei joined Megvii in 2018 and is now co-CTO of an AI-powered medical imaging solution startup.
Jingdong Wang, another student under Long at VisGraph, spent 14 years at MSRA (contributing to work on high-resolution representation [HRNet]) and then joined Baidu as chief scientist for computer vision
Lu Yuan, also Long’s student, also interned at MSRA and still works at Microsoft as Principal Research Manager in the Cognitive Services Research at Microsoft Cloud and AI (his Microsoft Selfie app won the “Best New APP” in 54 countries)
Long Quan has also worked to industrialize the VisGraph lab’s research accomplishments.
Last week, we covered Jianxiong Xiao, who went to MIT for a PhD, joined Princeton as an assistant professor, and then started an autonomous driving start-up AutoX.
Another one of Long’s students, Tian Fang, wanted to explore “how to combine digital image capture hardware (which is getting better and better) and automated 3D reconstruction technology so that more people can easily reconstruct 3D models and create 3D content.” In 2015, Long Quan, Tian Fang, and some PhD students founded Altizure, a platform that converted aerial photos from drones into 3D real-life models. Comment: The article states this platform was eventually acquired by “international giants”, but I wasn’t able to find more details.
From the afterword: “Long Quan chose the seldom-traveled road of 3D vision early on, ‘all the way to the end’, from Taiyuan, to Beijing, to France, to Hong Kong, from the first ethnic Chinese person to get a paper accepted at ICCV to a chair of ICCV and CVPR.”
FULL TRANSLATION: An Ethnic Chinese History of Computer Vision: Long Quan and His Students
ChinAI Links (Four to Forward)
Should-read: AI entanglements - Balancing risks and rewards of European-Chinese collaboration
MERICS researchers published a lengthy report last year on a topic related to this week’s feature translation, which explored Sino-French collaboration in computer vision. Excellent, balanced take on the risks and rewards of Europe-China collaboration in AI. Authored by: Rebecca Arcesati, Wendy Chang, Antonia Hmaidi, and Kai von Carnap.
Should-read: Private-Sector AI Indicators dataset
The Emerging Technology Observatory has published a new dataset on AI-related activity for hundreds of companies from around the world. We’ll circle back to this one, as I want to take some time to play around with it. H/t to Eric Lawrence for sharing.
Should-listen: The Era of Killer Robots is Here
Hosted by Natalie Kitroeff and featuring Paul Mozur, The Daily podcast had a great episode on autonomous weapons, the Russia-Ukraine conflict, and the future of warfare. H/t to my former student Leo for sharing.
Should-apply: Summer Webinar Series on U.S. emerging tech policy careers
The Horizon Institute for Public Service is offering this webinar series to help individuals interested in federal AI and biosecurity policy decide if they should pursue careers in these fields. The free series will run from mid-July to the end of August.
Thank you for reading and engaging.
These are Jeff Ding's (sometimes) weekly translations of Chinese-language musings on AI and related topics. Jeff is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at George Washington University.
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