Towards More Accessible Tools for Content Creation

Speaker:   Prof. Hongbo FU
           Professor and Acting Head
           Division of Arts and Machine Creativity
           Academy of Interdisciplinary Studies
           HKUST

Title:     "Towards More Accessible Tools for Content Creation"

Date:      Monday, 28 October 2024

Time:      4:00pm - 5:00pm

Veneu:     Lecture Theater F
           (Leung Yat Sing Lecture Theater), near lift 25/26
           HKUST

Abstract:

Traditional game and filming industries heavily rely on professional
artists to make 2D and 3D visual content. In contrast, future industries
such as metaverse and 3D printing highly demand digital content from
personal users. With modern software, ordinary users can easily produce
text documents, create simple drawings, make simple 3D models consisting
of primitives, take images/videos, and possibly edit them with pre-defined
filters. However, creating photorealistic images from scratch,
fine-grained image retouching (e.g., for body reshaping), detailed 3D
models, vivid 3D animations, etc., often require extensive training with
professional software and is time-consuming, even for skillful artists.
Generative AI, e.g., based on ChatGPT and Midjourney, recently has taken a
big step and allows the easy generation of unique and high-quality images
from text prompts. However, various problems, such as controllability and
generation beyond images, still need to be solved. Besides AI, the recent
advances in Augmented/Virtual Reality (AR/VR) software and hardware bring
unique challenges and opportunities for content creation. In this talk, I
will introduce my attempts to lower the barrier of content creation,
making such tools more accessible to novice users. I will mainly focus on
sketch-based content generation and content creation with AR/VR.


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Biography:

Hongbo Fu is a Professor and Acting Head at the Division of Arts and
Machine Creativity, Hong Kong University of Science Technology. Before
joining HKUST, he worked at the School of Creative Media, City University
of Hong Kong, for over 15 years. He had postdoctoral research training at
the Imager Lab, University of British Columbia, Canada, and the Department
of Computer Graphics, Max-Planck-Institut Informatik, Germany. He received
a Ph.D. degree in computer science from the Hong Kong University of
Science and Technology in 2007 and a BS degree in information sciences
from Peking University, China, in 2002. His primary research interests
fall in computer graphics, human-computer interaction, and computer
vision. His research has led to over 100 scientific publications,
including 70+ papers in the best graphics/vision journals (ACM TOG, IEEE
TVCG, IEEE PAMI) and 30+ papers in the best vision/HCI conferences (CVPR,
ICCV, ECCV, CHI, UIST). His recent works have received a Silver Medal from
Special Edition 2022 Inventions Geneva Evaluation Days (IGED), the Best
Demo awards at the Emerging Technologies program, SIGGRAPH Asia in 2013
and 2014, and the Best Paper awards from CAD/Graphics 2015 and UIST 2019.

He was the Organization Co-Chair of Pacific Graphics 2012, the Program
Chair/Co-chair of CAD/Graphics 2013 & 2015, SIGGRAPH Asia 2013 (Emerging
Technologies) & 2014 (Workshops), Pacific Graphics 2018, Computational
Visual Media 2019, and the Conference Chair of SIGGRAPH Asia 2016 and
Expressive 2018. He was on the SIGGRAPH Asia Conference Advisory Group and
is currently Vice-Chairman of the Asia Graphics Association. He will be
the Conference Co-chair of Computational Visual Media 2025. He has served
as an Associate Editor of The Visual Computer, Computers & Graphics, and
Computer Graphics Forum.