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Bio

I have been a research scientist at Adobe since 2010.  I research Computer Vision, develop new technologies, transfer them to Adobe products, and work with universities and PhD students through collaborations and internships.

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My research interests encompass computer vision, graphics and machine learning.  In particular, I have been looking into selection and segmentation (interactive and automatic, image and video, binary and matting) as well as image synthesis and document understanding.  I actively collaborate with other, and have worked with 60+ PhD students as interns and participated in 50+ university collaborations.  Most of these collaborations end up as publications, most often in Tier 1 venues.

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I enjoy seeing my products turn into Adobe features that are used by millions of our customers.  Technologies that made it into products that I have developed or contributed to include:

  • Object-aware Matting in Photoshop

  • Select Subject update in Photoshop (focused on better selecting portraits and people)

  • Object Selection feature in Photoshop

  • Select and Mask feature in Photoshop

  • Auto Selection in Photoshop Elements

  • Key Cleaner tool in AfterEffects

  • Refine Selection tool in Photoshop Elements 

  • Smart Selection tool in Photoshop Mix 

  • Auto Select function in Photoshop Mix

  • Smart Crop feature in Photoshop Elements and Photoshop Mix

  • Collage feature in Photoshop Express

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As a hobby, I really enjoy photography, including using Photoshop and Lightroom to enhance my photos.  This gives me a valuable perspective on the research that I do.

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Before Adobe, I received my PhD degree in Computer Science from Brigham Young University in 2010, and my adviser was Dr. Bryan Morse. My PhD research focused on interactive image segmentation and matting in images and videos. Before that, I received my masters degree from the same institution under the guidance of Dr. William Barrett.   

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Awards

  • Best Paper Runner Up at ICME 2020

  • Tech Excellence Award from Adobe

  • CVPR 2019 Outstanding Reviewer

  • Named Distinguished Inventor at Adobe

  • Best Paper award - 3DIMPVT 2012

  • CI Fellowship recipient

  • National Merit Scholarship recipient

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Professional Service

  • Area Chair for ECCV 2024

  • Area Chair for CVPR 2023

  • Finance Chair for CVPR 2022

  • Area Chair for WACV 2022

  • Area Chair for CVPR 2021

  • Co-organizer of 1st Large-scale Video Object Segmentation Challenge (ECCV 2018 workshops).

  • Area Chair for WACV 2016

  • Corporate Sponsorship Chair for ICCV 2015

  • Demo Award Selection Committee for ICCV 2015

  • Industry Chair for ACCV 2014

  • Demo Award Selection Committee for CVPR 2014

  • Mentor for the National Consortium for Graduate Engineering Degrees for Minorities (GEM) Fellowship program - 2013-14

  • Co-organizer of matting tutorial at ICCV 2013

  • Technical Program Committee member for ICCV 2023, 2021, 2019, 2015, 2013, 2011; CVPR 2022, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013, 2012, 2011, 2010; ECCV 2020; ACCV 2014; SIGGRAPH Asia 2014; Eurographics 2009; SIGGRAPH 2017, 2007

  • Reviewer for IJPRAI, TCSVT, TPAMI, TIP, IJCV, MICCAI, TOG, Visual Computer

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Invited Talks

  • "Understanding Data Visualizations via Question Answering", ICDAR 2021 Workshop on Document Visual Question Answering, Sep 2021.

  • “Machine Learning, Graphics, Vision, HCI, and AR/VR at Adobe Research Workshop”, Bowie State University.  Mar 2021.

  • "Gaining a Deeper Visual Understanding of Documents", Text and Documents in the Deep Learning Era, CVPR workshops, June 2020.

  • "Interactive Video Object Segmentation", 1st Large-scale Video Object Segmentation Challenge, ECCV workshops, Sep 2018.

  • "SceneStitch", Adobe MAX Sneaks, Oct 2017.

  • "The Past, Present, and Future of Document Analysis", Brigham Young University, Sep 2017.

  • "Interactive Object Selection in Images using Deep Learning", GPU Technology Conference, May 2017.

  • "Advances in Image Analysis and Understanding", United States Patent and Trademark Office Tech Fair, Mar 2017.

  • "Advancements in Object Selection in Images", Brigham Young University, Mar 2017.

  • "Why You Should Get a PhD", Brigham Young University, Nov 2015.

  • "Matting and Composition in Professional Workflows", CVPR 2015 tutorial: Computer Vision for Visual Effects, June 2015.

  • "Image Matting",    UC Merced,    Feb 2014.

  • "Image Matting", "Video Matting", and "Future challenges for matting",    ICCV Matting tutorial,    Dec 2013.

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