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Spring 2026 GRASP Seminar: Ruohan Gao, University of Maryland, College Park, “Multisensory Objects in Multisensory Space”
January 16 @ 1:00 pm - 2:00 pm
This was a hybrid event with in-person attendance in Levine 512 and virtual attendance…
ABSTRACT
The future of artificial intelligence calls for systems that can perceive, recreate, and generate multisensory experiences grounded in the physical world. As people move through dynamic environments—whether wearing AR glasses, riding in a car, or exploring virtual spaces—the line between perception and generation begins to blur. This talk will mainly examine how we can equip machines to understand and reproduce the rich interplay of sight and sound to enable immersive, context-aware experiences. I will focus on two core components of the multisensory world: (1) multisensory objects and (2) multisensory space. For each, I will discuss how we can reliably capture real-world multisensory data, model it with differentiable rendering, and unlock creative cross-modal applications that connect perception with generation.
Presenter
Ruohan Gao - Learn More
Ruohan Gao is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at the University of Maryland, College Park, where he leads the UMD Multisensory Machine Intelligence Lab. Before joining UMD, he spent a year at Meta as a Research Scientist after his Postdoc at the Stanford Vision and Learning Lab. He received his Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from The University of Texas at Austin. He mainly works in the fields of computer vision and machine learning with a particular emphasis on multisensory machine intelligence involving sight, sound, and touch. His research has been recognized by the AAAI New Faculty Highlights 2025, the Michael H. Granof Award which is designated for UT Austin’s Top 1 Doctoral Dissertation, the Google PhD Fellowship, the Adobe Research Fellowship, a Best Student Paper Award at WASPAA 2025, a Best Paper Award Runner Up at BMVC 2021, and a Best Paper Award Finalist at CVPR 2019.