Yuwang Kim, an integrated MS/PhD student in POSTECH Electrical Engineering, and Jiyeon Kim, an integrated MS/PhD student in IT Convergence Engineering (advisor: Professor Tae-Hyun Oh), won the Minister of Science and ICT Award, the Grand Prize with KRW 15 million, at the 15th ICT Paper Competition, jointly hosted by Electronic Times, Webcash Group, and the Software Financial Cooperative.

The competition supports outstanding papers with scholarships to promote ICT research. Their “Text-Based 4D Human Avatar Generation” research was selected for the Grand Prize from numerous candidates.

The system generates realistic, animated 4D human avatars from user text describing actions and appearance. Its distinctive feature is expressing avatar movement and appearance from text alone without training data. As an enabling technology for realistic avatars and 3D content, it is expected to advance AR/VR and other metaverse technologies.

The work extends research the authors published and presented at ECCV 2022, a leading AI conference. Following their Qualcomm Innovation Fellowship Korea 2022 award on a similar topic, they achieved another success with this ministerial award.

Yuwang Kim is currently conducting research as an invited intern at Germany’s Max Planck Institute for Informatics (University of Tübingen).