Won the Innovation Award in the AI Category at CES 2025 - the only award-winning project from Mainland China! My startup, Yuanhuo Technology, which I founded, was honored for developing a personalized AI companionship platform.

Our team won the National Champion at the First L’Oréal Beauty Tech Hackathon in China. Grateful for the chance to compete in the China Grand Final of L’Oréal’s inaugural Beauty Tech Hackathon!

Won the Gold Medal at the 50th Geneva International Exhibition of Inventions, Switzerland. As a member of Jacobi.ai (an HKUST(GZ) spin-off), I joined the team that won a Gold Medal at the 50th International Exhibition of Inventions Geneva 2025.

High-fidelity digital humans are increasingly used in interactive applications, yet achieving both visual realism and real-time responsiveness remains a major challenge. We present a high-fidelity, real-time conversational digital human system that seamlessly combines a visually realistic 3D avatar, persona-driven expressive speech synthesis, and knowledge-grounded dialogue generation. To support natural and timely interaction, we introduce an asynchronous execution pipeline that coordinates multi-modal components with minimal latency. The system supports advanced features such as wake word detection, emotionally expressive prosody, and highly accurate, context-aware response generation. It leverages novel retrieval-augmented methods, including history augmentation to maintain conversational flow and intent-based routing for efficient knowledge access. Together, these components form an integrated system that enables responsive and believable digital humans, suitable for immersive applications in communication, education, and entertainment.

Sandplay is an effective psychotherapy for mental retreatment, and many people prefer to engage in sandplay in Virtual Reality (VR) due to its convenience. Haptic perception of physical objects and miniatures enhances the realism and immersion in VR. Previous studies have rendered sizes by exerting pressure on the user’s fingertips or employing tangible, shape-changing devices. However, these interfaces are limited by the physical shapes they can assume, making it difficult to simulate objects that grow larger or smaller than the interface. Motivated by literature on visual-haptic illusions, this work aims to convey the haptic sensation of a virtual object’s shape to the user by exploring the relationships between the haptic feedback from real objects and their visual renderings in VR. Our study focuses on the confirmation and adjustment ratios for different virtual object sizes. The results show that the likelihood of participants confirming the correct size of virtual cubes decreases as the object size increases, requiring more adjustments for larger objects. This research provides valuable insights into the relationships between haptic sensations and visual inputs, contributing to the understanding of visual-haptic illusions in VR environments.