To Prospective Students

Last update: 8/2026

I want to be a great advisor and believe that this can only happen if and only if:

• there is significant overlap between what you and I are excited about. So please take a look at my research group page, and think about what you feel passionate and highly motivated to work on. Your interests should align, or better yet, expand mine: one of the best things about being in graduate school is that you get to teach others knowledge that, before you, have never been discovered, and I am eager to learn from you things that I've never heard/thought of before.
• we actually like each other as well as what we are doing. To figure this out, we should communicate, and hopefully work together, before you fully join my group. The best way to do this is to start some informal collaboration before you apply/join. This can be taking on a small project of mutual interests or discussing papers you've been reading.

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What We Do

Ultimately, our research mission is to 1) discover new sciences so we understand things that we previously don't, and 2) build new engineering systems to do things that we previously couldn't.

Concretely, we do research at the intersection of imaging (optics + image sensors), human perception and cognition (psychophysics and computational modeling), and computer systems (computer architecture and programming model). A common tool underlying many of our explorations is deep learning.

Below is a partial list of things that we are currently exploring:

• Understanding A_ctual Intelligence through evolution, development, and learning.
• Building unconventional (e.g., optical) computing platforms to accelerate the discovery of A_ctual Intelligence.
• Understanding, modeling, and exploiting human visual system to build efficient Augmented and Virtual Reality devices (e.g., color perception-driven display and memory compression, foveated neural rendering).
• Computer systems for robotics and Embodied AI.
• Imaging-computing co-design (e.g., camera energy modeling, bespoke eye-tracking sensor architecture and algorithm).
• Computational visual humanities.

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Send an Email

If you've made this far, feel free to send me an email telling us why your interests align with ours and how you can contribute. Ideally, you will have read one of our recent papers and tell us what you think, e.g., insights you learn from the paper, things that you are not convinced, how you would have done things differently, etc.