Asiagraphics Young Researcher Award (2022)

The 2022 Asiagraphics (AG) Young Researcher Award was presented to Dr. Yifan “Evan” Peng from the University of Hong Kong (HKU), China. The winner of this award was selected by the award jury chaired by Prof. Ming Lin (UMD College Park) and Prof. Leif Kobbelt (RWTH Aachen).

Dr. Yifan “Evan” Peng joined the University of Hong Kong (HKU) as an Assistant Professor in 2022. Before that, he has worked for over three years as a Postdoctoral Research Scholar at Stanford University. Dr. Peng received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of British Columbia (UBC) and both his M.Sc. and B.E. in Optical Science and Engineering from Zhejiang University (ZJU).

Dr. Peng conducts high-impact research in the unique intersection of computer graphics, computer vision, optics, and artificial intelligence, in particular the Joint-design of Hardware and Software for Intelligent Visual Computing Systems. Specifically, he and his team have leveraged AI advances to bridge the long-standing gap of optimal designs between devices and algorithms, with the potential impact of revolutionizing camera and display industry. Remarkably, this fundamental design paradigm has merited over 25 research articles and been well received among his research peers with citations by many top-tier journals, for example, Nature, Nature Methods, ACM TOG, TPAMI, and Light: Sci. & Applications.

In the popular field of VR|AR|MR, Dr. Peng and his team has proposed Neural Holography, a family of computational holography techniques (SIGGRAPH Asia’20/’21, SIGGRAPH’22, Optica’21, OL’21, and Sci. Advances’21) built upon the combination of computer-generated holographic displays and machine intelligence. With the proposed Camera-in-the-loop Optimization and Training scheme, high-fidelity 2D and 3D holographic displays in real-time are enabled for the first time. Notably, this out-standing work has led to numerous attentions and supports from many reputable industrial players including Ford, Sony, Nvidia, and Intel. Most recently, he collaborated with NVIDIA Research to develop a prototype of Holographic VR Glasses that was presented in SIGGRAPH’22.

To computational cameras, Dr. Peng’s excellent work Deep Optics, the end-to-end differentiable wave optics and image processing, has become a well-recognized design paradigm in the field. Compared to conventional ones, the resulting camera systems are not only more compact in footprint but also more powerful for various domain-specific imaging tasks, including elaborated work of Extended DoF (SIGGRAPH’18), Large FoV (SIGGRAPH Asia’19), HDR (CVPR’20), Superresolution SPAD (TOG’20), Depth Estimation (ICCP’21), Compound Lenses (TOG’21), and Hyperspectral (Optica’21). Besides, Dr. Peng delivered the popular course of Deep Optics (SIGGRAPH’20), as well as established the R&D consulting collaboration with the world-leading cellphone maker.

Dr. Peng is also making great contributions to the graphics and optics communities with serving Program Committee and/or Session Chair roles, including IEEE ISMAR and VR, ACM SIGGRAPH Asia Courses, Eurographics, SPIE AR|VR|MR, AG CVM, SID DW, and IEEE ICCP, let alone he has been invited to deliver such many (over 20x) talks in academic and industrial venues. Due to his prominent research and services, Dr. Peng was presented the Young Leader Award at SID International Conference on Display Tech 2022.