Guo-Jun Qi

I am honored to be appointed by courtesy an Adjunct Professor of Artificial Intelligence at Westlake University. I am managing the Machine Perception and Learning (MAPLE, maple-lab.net) lab as the director. Westlake University, located in the picturesque city of Hangzhou, is the first private non-profit research-oriented university in Mainland China. It is both supported by public and private funding and a vanguard in the reform of the higher education system in China. With its predecessor Westlake Institute for Advanced Study established in 2016, Westlake University is striving to cultivate top talent, to make breakthroughs in basic research and innovation in cutting-edge technologies, and to foster human development through science and technology.

I am the director of MAPLE (MAchine Perception and LEarning) Lab, developing research programs for Artificial Intelligence and Deep Learning with their applications to Multimodal AI/AIGC foundation models, Computer Vision, and Multimodal Content Generation and Interactions. Our mission is to enable machines to perceive and understand the real world, so they can intelligently generate multimodal contents and robustly perform in challenging tasks. Learn more about us at http://maple-lab.net/index.html. The MAPLE Lab was established in 2014 at UCF, and now is hosted at Westlake University, the first private university in Mainland China. The lab is looking for researchers, engineers and artists at various career levels, as well as undergraduate, graduate and visiting students to join us.

I am a technical VP and the Chief Scientist in Huawei Research USA (Futurewei Technologies) based in Bellevue, WA, overseeing and leading the R&D for multiple cloud computing services, including Smart Cities, Visual Computing, Satellite Remoting Sensing, Vechicle Networking, and Autonomous Driving.

OPPO Seattle Research Center focuses on AI R&D and its applications to multimodal content understanding and generation, and applications to AR/VR and multimodal interactions with physical and virtual world. Role: • Founded the OPPO Seattle research center from the scratch since April 2021; • Building the R&D team as the chief architect to develop Multimodal AIGC/LLMs for digital assistants and avatars on smartphones as well as efficient multimodal content generation, including o AvatarGPT/OmniMotionGPT to generate avatars with prompted appearances and motions, o text-prompted 2D/panorama images/videos, and 3D objects/backgrounds to create AI generated virtual worlds, o MLLMs enabling multimodal chats with users to create story-telling images and videos, o Efficient MLLMs facilitating multimodal content generation and user interactions on smart devices; • Enabling the technology transfer from the research teams to the product teams for virtual avatars, AIGC-based VR content generation, next-generation light stage and smart phone capturing; • Working with university collaborators and developer communities to expand a technical eco-system; organizing international academic conferences, and grand challenges to develop strategic partnerships with researchers, engineers and developers at large.

I am a faculty membere and the Director of MAPLE (MAchine Perception and LEarning) in the Computer Science Department in the University of Central Florida. My current research interests focus on machine learning and data mining, as well as developing highly reliable information integration systems involving multimodal data (images, audio/video, text etc.), in an open connected environment (e,g., social and mobile networks). My overarching research aims at seamlessly integrating the data and network sciences under a unified computational model and theory.

Big data analytics, healthcare data mining, and sensor networks for R&D on cognitive computing and the Watson project.

machine learning and applications in information retrieval and personalized recommendation systems

multimedia computing and video analysis.