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Hao (Richard) Zhang (张皓) Image Image
Distinguished SFU Professor, VP of AI and R&D at Augmenta
Email: haoz @ sfu . ca

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I am a Professor in the School of Computing Science at SFU, and also Vice President of AI and R&D at Augmenta. At Augmenta, I lead the company's effort in developing the most advanced AI models and tools for efficient and sustainable building designs. More broadly, we are exploring spatial and functional intelligence to tackle challenges in the physical world and contributing to the R&D ecosystem for physical AI.

I obtained my Ph.D. from the Dynamic Graphics Project (DGP) at the University of Toronto, and MMath and BMath degrees from the University of Waterloo. I direct the GrUVi (Graphics U Vision) Lab, one of the top places in the world to conduct computer graphics and computer vision research. My research is in computer graphics and more broadly, visual computing, with special interests in geometric and generative modeling, shape analysis, 3D vision, spatial AI, geometric deep learning, as well as computational design and fabrication. I have published more than 200 papers on these topics, including 75+ articles in SIGGRAPH (+Asia) and ACM Trans. on Graphics (TOG), the top venue in computer graphics, and I have an Erdös number of 3. My research has been sponsored by Adobe, Autodesk, Boeing, Glodon, Google, and NSERC. I am an IEEE Fellow (see SFU news coverage), hold a Distinguished University Professorship, and am a member of the ACM SIGGRAPH Academy. I was an Amazon Scholar from late 2021 to early 2025.

I am privileged to have worked with many excellent students and postdocs. As of 2022, twelve of them are working as professors themselves. Awards and honours won by my current and past students include the Alain Fournier Best Graphics Thesis Award (twice), Eurographics PhD Award, Asia Graphics Young Researcher Award, National Science Fund for Outstanding and Excellent Young Scholars in China (1 杰青, 3 优青), Azrieli Postdoc Fellowship, winners/finalists of Google, NVidia and Adobe PhD Fellowships, SFU Govenor's Gold Medal, as well as CVPR 2020 Best Student Paper Award and Best Paper Award at SGP 2008. Major companies where my students are working or have worked/interned at include Adobe, Amazon, Apple, Bytedance, EA, Google, Huawei, Meta (formerly Facebook), Microsoft, NVidia, and Snap.

In my spare time, I play badminton regularly, run about 5-10K per week, ski on blue/black runs (see a recent video of Grouse Mountain skiing with kids), and occasionally come up with cool puzzles to "challenge" prospective grad students.

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