Brown CS News

Brown CS PhD student Tongyu Zhou was recently selected for the annual Rising Stars workshop, a program hosted by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)’s Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science that recognizes underrepresented PhD students and postdocs, especially those who could potentially become faculty members in the coming years. 

An advisee of Brown CS faculty member Jeff Huang and member of his Human-Computer Interaction Lab, Tongyu previously received her bachelor’s degree in Computer Science and Statistics from Williams College. 

“Rising Stars is a competitive program,” Jeff says. “It is a mark that Tongyu has already had major accomplishments so early in her academic career, and many universities recruit new faculty from this pool.”

The field of creative visual authoring is becoming increasingly digitized with the advent of new tools, and Tongyu’s work focuses on establishing creative systems from an artistic perspective, with the goal of exploring and bridging the 2D and 3D domains through introducing new interactions between texture, animation, and even text, particularly in vector graphics. She also addresses challenges that arise due to subjective bias during the peer review process in design critiques. 

Tongyu designs interactions within web and augmented reality domains to develop systems that support the visual creativity of individuals. Specifically, she develops creative systems to support practitioners by addressing pain points of new form factors and interactions across both 2D and 3D workspaces with the unique output formats they produce in mind.

“These systems investigate what happens when traditional workflows and mental models are mapped to digital mediums and how we can take advantage of the benefits of generative technologies while preserving core human experiences,” Tongyu explains. “One unique aspect about our work is that our systems go beyond research prototypes – they are actively maintained and have real-world applications.”

Tongyu is currently in the fifth year of her PhD, and will be proposing her dissertation soon. When asked about her future, she answered that she will continue building human-centered tools empowering users to create more dynamic and scalable hypermedia, regardless of past skill level, workflows, and experience.

“I am super honored to be selected!” Tongyu says. “I’ve heard a ton of good things about the workshop, and am excited to learn about the entire academic job search process and what life as a junior faculty member may look like. I’m also looking forward to connecting with other EECS PhD students and postdocs outside my immediate field of HCI.”

Tongyu’s recent work includes a research internship at Adobe that led to a patent and showcase at Adobe Max Summit Sneaks. Her work has also been published in several conferences, winning two Best Paper Honorable Mentions and receiving news coverage from Adobe Research News, Fast Company, and ZDNET.

“Tongyu is one of the boldest and most productive PhD students I have known,” Jeff says. “Every project she works on turns to gold, winning research awards and national recognition. She has the perfect combination of skills between artistic creativity, mature software development capabilities, and an AI and statistics background.”

Jeff adds that for some time, Tongyu has been mentoring students such as former undergraduate researcher Sarah Bawabe, who received an honorable mention for the CRA Outstanding Undergraduate Researcher Award in 2021, and Joshua Yang, who won 1st place in the ACM CHI 2023 Student Research Competition.

Tongyu joins Esha Ghosh, a Brown CS alum who was selected as a Rising Star in 2018 for her research on efficient algorithms for secure computing on outsourced data, and is now a part of Microsoft Research.

For more information, click the link that follows to contact Brown CS Communications Manager Jesse C. Polhemus.