Huaijin (George) Chen
陳懷瑾 | Assistant Professor, University of Hawaii at Manoa
I’m an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at University of Hawaii at Manoa (UHM), where I direct the Computational Imaging and Robotic Perception Lab. My group aims to build cameras that capture the complete properties of light beyond human vision, including transient light transport, phase, polarization, and spectral information. We develop physics-informed AI methods to process and interpret these non-conventional imaging data. For real-world applications, we integrate these novel imagers into robotic platforms to advance multi-modal perception and vision-language-action (VLA) models, with a focus on agriculture and healthcare, where intelligent visual sensing enhances automation, safety, and accessibility.
Prior to UHM, from 2022 to 2024, I was the founding Computational Imaging Lead at Vayu Robotics, focusing on enhancing autonomous vehicle perception through innovative imaging techniques. Vayu is backed by Khosla Ventures, and guided by Nobel laureate Geoffrey Hinton. From 2019 to 2022, I was with SenseBrain Technology, where I contributed to computational photography on smartphones. My team made strides in areas like novel image sensor, under-display camera tech, 3D ToF imaging, and neural image compression.
I received my Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Rice University in 2019, focusing on physics-aware deep learning in computational imaging, and my B.S. in Imaging Science from RIT in 2013. As a student, I was fortunate to have the opportunities to visit research groups at Cornell, Northwestern, and Brown, and interned at NVIDIA Research, IBM, and Light Labs. I also co-founded and led SenseWatch, a startup focused on gesture recognition and vital sign monitoring for wearable devices. Grateful to my mentors and hosts for their support!