The Google Ph.D. Fellowship Program has selected Qianqian Wang as one of its 2022 fellows. Wang is a fifth-year Ph.D. student in the field of computer science based at Cornell Tech, where she is advised by associate professor Noah Snavely and assistant professor Bharath Hariharan.
Each year, the fellowship program recognizes the “best and the brightest” graduate students doing outstanding research in computer science and related fields. The fellowship provides up to three years of funding.
The award will support Wang’s research on 3D computer vision, computer graphics, and machine learning. “My goal is to understand and model the physical properties of our 3D world around us using visual data — images or videos,” Wang said.
Her work focuses on 3D reconstruction, where she uses 2D images to capture the geometry, appearance, and motion of objects or scenes. She is also working on new image-based rendering techniques, which use multiple 2D images to recreate new views of a scene.
Ultimately, Wang’s research may enhance the quality of augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) applications, creating interactive classroom experiences for students, realistic 3D video calls, and opportunities to explore new parts of the world through a VR headset.
Recently, Wang was a co-author on research nominated for a best paper award at the 2022 IEEE Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Conference (CVPR) for the paper, Neural Body: Implicit Neural Representations with Structured Latent Codes for Novel View Synthesis of Dynamic Humans.
Post-graduation, Wang plans to pursue a career in research, either in academia or industry.
“I hope that my technology can enable us to create a rich and realistic virtual world,” Wang said.
By Patricia Waldron, a science writer for the Cornell Ann S. Bowers College of Computing and Information Science.