Biography

I am a Senior Staff Research Scientist at Google, where I lead a team of scientists and engineers in developing and deploying production-level computer vision and machine learning models. Our work includes the development of perception and generative models for Google’s Face Unlock feature, from its first launch on Pixel 4 (2019) with NIR sensors, and evolving to commodity RGB sensors across all classes of Pixel devices, including Pixel 7 (2022), Pixel Fold & 7a and Pixel 8 (2023), Pixel 8a and 9 Series (2024), Pixel 9a (2025).

Prior to Google, I was a Deep Learning Scientist at Apple, where I played a key role in developing on-device models for several products, including Apple’s first Face ID for iPhone X and iPad Pro (2017), as well as real-time camera features deployed on subsequent iPhones (2018). Before Apple, I was a research staff at the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University from Aug 2010–2013, and received my Ph.D. from the same institute in Jan 2017.

I have (co-)authored over 40 publications in leading CV/ML conferences and journals. I led the early development of IntraFace, an automated face analysis software that received the Best Demo Award in IEEE Conference on Automatic Face and Gesture Recognition (AFGR) in 2015. A spinoff of IntraFace, FacioMetrics, was later acquired by Facebook in Nov 2016. I continue to contribute to the academic community by serving as an Area Chair on conferences such as AFGR, ACCV, and ICMI.

Interns

• Lan Wang (MSU/Vishnu Boddeti), 2024.
• Ziqian Lin (UW-Madison/Kangwook Lee), 2024, next Research Scientist at Google.
• Shengjie Zhu (MSU/Xiaoming Liu), 2024, next Applied Scientist at Amazon.
• Manli Shu (UMD/Tom Goldstein), 2023, next Researcher at Salesforce AI Research.
• Yiyou Sun (UW-Madison/Sharon Li), 2022, next Post-doc at UC Berkeley.
• Giannis Daras (UT Austin/Alexandros Dimakis), 2021, next Post-doc at MIT CSAIL.
• Jason Chong (UIUC/David Froysth), 2020, next Researcher at ByteDance AI Research.
• Shlok Mishra (UMD/David Jacobs), 2020, next Research Scientist at Meta AI.

Students

• Litu Rout (UT Austin/Sanjay Shakkottai), 2023.
• Esther Robb (Virginia Tech/Jia-Bin Huang), 2019, next PhD student at Stanford.
• Jaymo Kang (UC Berkeley), 2018, next Soft Engineer at Nines.

Area Chair

• Asian Conference on Computer Vision (ACCV), 2024
• IEEE Conference on Automatic Face and Gesture Recognition (AFGR), 2023, 2025
• ACM International Conference on Multimodal Interaction (ICMI), 2020
• ACM International Conference on Multimodal Interaction (ICMI), 2019
• IEEE Conference on Automatic Face and Gesture Recognition (AFGR), 2019
• IEEE Conference on Automatic Face and Gesture Recognition (AFGR), 2018

Organizing Committee

• ICMI 2021 (Sponsorship Chair)

Conference Review

• Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2014–present
• International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2015–present
• European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2012–present
• Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS), 2019–present
• Automatic Face and Gesture Recognition (AFGR), 2015–present
• Asian Conference on Compute Vision (ACCV), 2012–2014, 2024
• AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), 2016–2022
• International Conference on Multimodal Interaction (ICMI), 2018–2020
• Affective Computing and Intelligent Interaction (ACII), 2015

Journal Review

• IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (TPAMI)
• International Journal of Computer Vision (IJCV)
• Journal of Computer Vision and Image Understanding (CVIU)
• Journal of Image and Vision Computing (IVC)
• IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing (TAFFC)
• IEEE Transactions on Multimedia (TMM)
• IEEE Transactions on Image Processing (TIP)
• IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics, Part B
• IEEE Transactions on Computational Imaging
• IEEE Transactions on Emerging Topics in Computing
• IEEE Signal Processing Magazine
• IEEE Signal Processing Letters
• Journal of Machine Vision and Applications
• Journal of Neurocomputing
• Journal of Knowledge and Information Systems
• Journal of Pattern Recognition and Artificial Intelligence

Awards

• Best Demo Award: AFGR 2015.
• Outstanding Reviewer: ECCV 2016, AFGR 2015, ACCV 2012.
• Doctoral Consortium: ICCV 2015, ACII 2015.
• Best Paper Award: IPPR Conf. on Computer Vision, Graphics & Image Processing 2007.

• wschu@google.com