June 19th, 2026 – 12:00-1:00 pm, EC4-2101A

This presentation describes the current state of the interdisciplinary Living Lab being developed on campus. The goal is to connect researchers across disciplines and make it easier to bring real environmental data into classes, undergraduate design projects, and research.

We will give a quick overview of the existing sensor setups in E2, RCH, and CPH, which have been collecting data for about 1 to 2 years. We will also discuss the planned expansion of the network, including new sensors to measure salt concentration in Laurel Creek, which is scheduled for deployment this summer.

Finally, we will introduce our new platform, DataHub.uwaterloo.ca, which brings together all data collected from campus sensors and citizen science into a single easy-to-use resource for both research and teaching. 
 

June 12th, 2026 – 12:00-1:00 pm, EC4-2101A

3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has emerged as a leading method for photorealistic scene reconstruction from multi-view images, yet existing approaches treat reconstruction as a purely visual optimization problem, ignoring the physical laws that govern real-world scenes. This talk explores a bidirectional relationship between physics and vision within the 3DGS framework. In the forward direction, physical and geometric priors are introduced at each stage of the pipeline: upsampled point cloud initialization improves reconstruction quality without architectural changes, mesh-coupled Gaussian representations enable physics simulation of dynamic scenes, and differentiable rigid-body simulation provides trajectory supervision during object occlusion in 4D reconstruction. In the inverse direction, we examine how observed fracture behaviour in food materials can be used to recover latent material parameters via surrogate modelling and reinforcement learning, enabling novel simulation of physically plausible fracture dynamics. Together, these contributions demonstrate that neither physics nor vision alone is sufficient for faithful dynamic reconstruction and simulation, and that integrating the two disciplines yields measurable and qualitatively meaningful improvements across all stages of the pipeline.
 

June 5th, 2026 – 12:00-1:00 pm, EC4-2101A

Previous eye tracking research in sports has relied on hand annotated areas of interest to label data. This bottlenecked the number of participants and trials that could be used for research leading to small sample sizes and expensive experimental set ups. Using RF-DETR and controlled environments, it is possible to automate ball detection with reasonable accuracy speeding up the analysis and increasing the sample size. The presentation will show how I automated data collection and how the automated ball detection helps with analyzing data in baseball and volleyball.
 

May 29th, 2026 – 12:00-1:00 pm, EC4-2101A

The recent advancements in artificial intelligence (AI) have been changing how we live, work, and dream, revolutionizing many industries through its versatile capabilities. Despite its many benefits, numerous challenges remain when integrating AI agents into our current workflows. No matter how advanced AI becomes, humans will remain in the loop at all times—focused more on goals, operating at higher levels of abstraction, and analyzing domain-specific circumstances. A major barrier to effective collaboration lies in the communication between humans and AI agents. In this talk, I will introduce my research, which takes a step toward addressing this gap using advanced interaction and visualization techniques to create harmony between humans and AI. I will share my perspective on the factors that influence human-AI communication, as well as showcase a range of example projects situated in various applications such as programming, information-seeking, and design.
 

May 22th, 2026 – 12:00-1:00 pm, EC4-2101A

My seminar focuses on 3D reconstruction of thin and strand-like structures such as hair, fur, fibres, and occluders. I first discuss direction-aware kernel support for neural implicit reconstruction of fuzzy geometry, then present a controlled 3D Gaussian Splatting study where thin occluders partially hide a target object. The goal is to understand how directional structure affects both representation quality and reconstruction capacity under occlusion.

Dr. Freda Shi

Personal website: https://mkoshkina.github.io/