Recruitment Advertisement for PhD / Master Students (2024 or 2025), and Research Assistants (All year round)（招收博士 / 硕士研究生[2024年或2025年]，及科研助理[全年]）
Personal Background
Hi there! I am Dr. Yinghao Huang, currently a Tenure-Tracking Assistant Professor at Great Bay University. I was a Post-doc Researcher working with Professor Taku Komura at The University of Hong Kong (August 2023 —— September 2024). Before moving to Hong Kong, I spent 7 years in Germany and earned my PhD degree (December 2022) in Computer Science from Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems and The University of Tuebingen, under the guidance of Director Michael J. Black and Professor Dimitris Tzionas. During my PhD, I also interned at Facebook Reality Labs and worked full-time at Momenta GmbH Europe for a short period.
Research Interests
I work at the intersection of Computer Vision, Computer Graphics, and Machine Learning, and mainly focus on research problems related to 3D Humans. My past research works include 3D Human Shape and Pose Estimation from Multi-view Videos, Lightweight and Real-time 3D Pose Estimation from Sparse IMUs, and Joint Markerless Reconstruction of Humans and Objects. You can find the full list of my publications on my Google Scholar page. I hold broad interests in various aspects of human body research, including but not limited to Next Generation Motion Capture (MoCap), Appearance and Geometry Modeling, Capture and Modeling of Interactive Behaviors between Humans, Objects and Environments, and also various types of 3D Human Motion Generations.
New Computational Humans Lab (CHL) at Great Bay University
I joined the newly established Great Bay University as a Tenure-Track Assistant Professor at the School of Computing and Information Technology around September 2024. I found and head a new laboratory tentatively called CHL for Computational Humans Lab (Conceived with great help from Director Michael J. Black). I am always recruting PhD and Master’s students, as well as Research Assistants. As the name CHL indicates, the topics will be centered around 2D or 3D Humans. I plan to continue my previous research efforts for the advancement of Virtual Human Technologies.
What CHL Can Offer to You
Great Bay University is a fresh new research university committed to building a higher education institution to integrate education with science, industry and the Greater Bay Area. Curretnly the degrees will be granted from other famous universities (For Computer Science students, master’s degrees will be granted from Shenzhen University, and the PhD degress will be from Harbin Institute of Technology (Shenzhen). For Electronic and Communication students, the collaboration universitiy will be Southern University of Science and Technology for master’s students and Sun Yat-sen University for PhD students). Normally the postgraduates will spend the first year at the collaboration university, then move to Great Bay University to complete the study. There are enough computing resources (GPUs and CPUs) provided by the school to support various types of AI research, and internally we plan to purchase necessary hardware devices to enable capture of 3D Humans data, including VICON MoCap system, XSens MoCap suits, 3D Face Scanner, High-Definition RGB cameras, and others. As a junior researcher, I value the chance of doing research together with students, and I hope we both can benefit from the collaboration experience and grow into better ourselves in both life and career. There will be weekly or bi-weekly one to one meetings between every student and me, in addition to the common weekly group meetings. I will be deeply invovled with every single project, and give detailed guidance based on my past experience. I will always be there to support each student whenever I am needed. I can recommend the students to do internship at other labs in both academia and industry, and I can also provide support for students who want to further their studies overseas.
How to Apply
If you are interested in working with me on any of the aforementioned topics, please do not hesitate to write me an email to arrange a detailed discussion. The correspondence should be addressed to yinghao_huang_91@gmail.com with the two underscores removed, and along with the inquiry email please also include: 1) your detailed CV, 2) a statement of why you want to work with me, and optionally 3) contact details of two or three referees (email addresses highly preferred). The language can be either English or Chinese.
What We Want from You
Before jumping to the application, you may want to firstly check whether you will fit into our new team or not. The requirement at the university will be the same as that of the collaboration universities (For PhD students, HIT-Shenzhen requires that the applicants should hold both bachelor and master’s degress from 211 or 985 universities). Ideally, we want the applicants to satisfy some of these requirements: 1) The applicants should have experience working in Computer Vision, Comoputer Graphics and / or Machine Learning. It is even greater if the applicants ever worked on 3D Humans. PhD applicants need to have at least one good publication. 2) The applicants are highly motivated to conduct cutting-edge research on the topic of 2D / 3D Humans. Doing research can be quite challenging sometimes, and only the ones determined to tackle the obstacles along the way are doomed to succeed. 3) A good understanding and mastery of underlying theories and logics behind various Machine Learning algorithms, like general Deep Learning, Variational Auto-Endoders, and Diffusion Models. Being good at English / Mathematics / Programming / Physics is a plus.
Last Words
Digital Humans or Virtual Humans have become a hot topic in both academia and industry, with many papers published at top-tier conferences and journals every year (In total, more than five thousand papers have been published at ToG over the last forty years. Among them, the seminal SMPL paper is the third most cited paper), many working opportunities offered at tech giants (Google, Apple, Meta, Tencent, Huawei, ByteDance and many others all have their own Virtual Human divisions), and many chances to build your name in this relatively new area. I am humbled to be able to continue exploring this exciting and promising direction, and I look forward to working with those who also think so. I hope you, who are reading this advertisement now, can be one of them, and one of us.
个人背景
大家好！我叫黄英豪，现在是大湾区大学的一名助理教授。之前我在香港大学Taku Komura教授课题组做过为期一年的博士后研究员（2023年8月到24年9月）。来香港之前，我在德国学习和生活了七年，最终在Michael J. Black所长和Dimitris Tzionas教授的指导下，获得了马克斯普朗克智能系统研究所和图宾根大学的博士学位。读博期间我曾在Facebook Reality Labs做过一次为期半年的实习，还在Momenta公司欧洲分部全职工作过一段时间。
研究兴趣
我的研究兴趣是计算机视觉，计算机图形学，和机器学习，尤其是和三维人体相关的各类问题。我之前的研究工作包括从多目视频中自动对人体的姿态和形态进行估计，基于稀疏IMU的轻量级实时人体姿态估计，及无标签的对人体和物体之间交互的三维重建。您可以在我的谷歌学术主页上找到完整的文章列表。我对各类和虚拟人体相关的研究问题都感兴趣，包括但不限于下一代动作捕捉技术，人体表观和几何建模，人体与物体及周围环境之间交互的数据采集和建模，各种类型的三维人体动作生成。
大湾区大学计算人体实验室
我在2024年的后半年，以长聘轨道助理教授的身份加入新成立的大湾区大学的信息科学技术学院。我成立了一个新的课题组（暂名为计算人体实验室，英文缩写为CHL，Computational Humans Lab，发音同Chill。Michae J. Black所长对起名亦有重大贡献~）并担任独立PI。新成立的课题组有若干博士研究生，硕士研究生，和科研助理的名额【具体数量待定】。我计划以新成立的课题组为依托，围绕二维和三维人体继续推进我之前的研究工作，以期为虚拟人体技术的发展和进步做出自己的贡献。
计算人体实验室能为您提供什么
大湾区大学是一所刚刚成立的新体制研究型大学，致力于建立一个将教育与科学、工业和大湾区融合的高等教育机构。当前学校的硕士研究生和博士研究生的学位将从内地其他知名高校颁发（计算机方向硕士研究生和深圳大学联合培养，博士研究生和哈尔滨工业大学（深圳）联合培养；电子通信方向硕士与南方科技大学联培，博士与中山大学联培）。通常硕士和博士研究生第一年在联合培养学校学习，自第二年起在大湾区大学完成学业。学院层面会提供充足的计算资源（CPU和GPU等）来支持各类人工智能方面的研究，同时实验室内部计划采购各类三维人体数据采集所需要的硬件设备，包括VICON动作捕捉系统，XSens动作捕捉套装，三维人脸扫描仪，高分辨率RGB相机，等等。作为一名刚起步的青年科研人员，我很珍视和不同层次学生一起工作的宝贵机会，并且希望我们各自都可以从科研合作中受益并在生活和工作方面成长为更好的自己。实验室以后每周会有一次全体组会，此外所有学生都会和我有一周一次或者两周一次的一对一meeting。我会深度参与到每个项目的整个生命周期，并基于我以往的经验给出细致的指导。我保证在学生需要我的帮助的时候会第一时间出现。根据需要我可以推荐学生到其他学校或者公司的实验室实习，并且对有志于在海外继续深造的学生提供帮助。
如何申请
如果您对上面提到的任一研究课题或其他相关课题感兴趣，并且愿意和我共事，请您尽快给我发送一封查询邮件，以便后续我们讨论各种细节问题。请发送邮件到yinghao_huang_91@gmail.com（去掉两个下划线），并随邮件附上：1）您的详细个人简历，2）说明为什么您想和我一起做研究，3）如果可以的话二到三个推荐人的联系方式（最好是邮箱地址），没有的话也无所谓。中英文皆可。
申请者应具备的条件
在开始正式申请之前，您还需要先确认下是否满足学校层面和实验室层面的招生要求。学校层面的要求和联合培养的学校相同（哈工深博士研究生要求本硕均为211高校及以上）。实验室层面的话，我们希望申请者可以满足下面一个或者多个要求： 1）申请者应该有计算机视觉，计算机图形学，或者是机器学习方面的学习和科研经历。如果是二维或者三维人体相关的学习和科研经历就更好了。博士研究生申请者需要发表过一篇及以上比较好的论文； 2）申请者需要对虚拟人方向足够感兴趣，并有足够的自驱力在二维和三维人体方面开展最前沿的科研工作。很多时候做科研都是很辛苦的，只有那些下定决心排除万难的人可以取得最后的成功； 3）申请者对于各类机器学习算法背后的底层逻辑应该有较好的理解和掌握，如一般的深度学习，变分自编码器，和扩散模型等。英语/数学/编程/物理水平较好是加分项。
写在最后
数字人或者虚拟人技术已经成为学术界和工业界的一个火热的方向。每年都有很多论文被顶级会议和期刊接受（在ToG过去四十多年所有发表五千多篇论文中，领域内经典论文SMPL引用数量位居第三，而且其引用数量还在快速增长中），各大科技巨头也都提供很好的工作岗位（谷歌，苹果，Meta，腾讯，华为，字节跳动等公司都有自己的虚拟人团队），同时这个新兴的领域也有很多打造个人品牌的机会。我很荣幸可以继续在这一令人兴奋且有光明前景的方向进行科研探索，并渴盼可以和持同样看法的其他人一起努力。我希望正在阅读这则招生通告的您就是这些人中的一员，并加入我们成为新团队的一份子。
