Biography

I am a Senior Staff Research Scientist & Manager at Google, where I lead a wonderful team of scientists and engineers developing production-level CV/ML/AI models. My work anchors Google’s identity intelligence, specializing perception and generative models that power Google’s Face Unlock. I spearheaded this technology’s evolution from its first launch on Pixel 4 (2019) with NIR sensors, to commodity RGB sensor deoployment across all Pixel tiers, including Pixel 7 (2022), Pixel Fold & 7a and Pixel 8 (2023), Pixel 8a and 9 Series (2024), Pixel 9a and 10 Series (2025).

Prior to Google, I was a Deep Learning Scientist at Apple, playing a central role in developing on-device models for Apple’s first Face ID on iPhone X and iPad Pro (2017), along with real-time camera features for subsequent iPhones (2018). I hold a Ph.D. from the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University, where I also served as research staff from 2010 to 2013.

With over 40 publications in top-tier CV/ML venues, my research bridges deep academic theory with industry impact. Notably, I led the foundational development of IntraFace, an automated face analysis software that won the AFGR 2015 Best Demo Award and the 2016 Test of Time Award, which successfully spun off FacioMetrics acquired by Facebook in Nov 2016. Beyond core R&D, I actively support the academic community by regularly serving as an Area Chair for conferences and giving lessons at Summar School on Biometrics.

Interns

• Qihao Liu (JHU/Alan Yuille), 2025.
• Arijit Ray (BU/Kate Saenko, Bryan Plummer), 2025, next Research Scientist at Google.
• Lan Wang (MSU/Vishnu Boddeti), 2024, next Researsh Scientist at Google.
• 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

• Ozgur Kara (UIUC/James M. Rehg), 2025.
• Romy Luo (UT Austin/Kristen Grauman, Alex Dimakis), 2025.
• 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

• International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML): 2026
• Internal Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS): 2026
• Asian Conference on Computer Vision (ACCV), 2024, 2026
• IEEE Conference on Automatic Face and Gesture Recognition (AFGR), 2018, 2019, 2023, 2025
• ACM International Conference on Multimodal Interaction (ICMI), 2019, 2020

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