Yoowang Kim, an integrated master's/doctoral student in POSTECH's Department of Electrical Engineering, and Jiyeon Kim, an integrated master's/doctoral student in IT Convergence Engineering, both advised by Professor Tae-Hyun Oh, won Qualcomm Innovation Fellowship Korea 2022 (QIFK 2022), with a KRW 4 million award.

Qualcomm Innovation Fellowship is a global scholarship program recognizing outstanding research in AI, machine learning, and autonomous driving. The students were selected from many candidates for their research on text-based 4D human avatar generation.

They proposed a system that generates realistic, lively 4D human avatar textures and motion using only user-entered text describing actions and appearance. A key feature is generating geometry and visual characteristics from text without additional training data. As a foundational technology for lifelike avatars and content production, it is expected to advance metaverse technologies including VR/AR.

The research was published and presented at the European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV) 2022 in Israel, one of the world's leading AI conferences. This is the Algorithmic Machine Intelligence Laboratory's second consecutive award, following QIFK 2021.

Professor Oh concurrently heads a RIST–POSCO Open Lab research group on video motion amplification. He continues active research and service, including as Area Chair for the leading International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV) 2023 and Associate Editor of The Visual Computer (impact factor 2.8).

Algorithmic Machine Intelligence (AMI Lab) @ POSTECH