A Waterloo Engineering professor has had their Tier 1 Canada Research Chair renewed, which will continue to support research to help AI-generated and immersive digital content meet the quality standards people expect.
Dr. Zhou Wang, a professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, will receive $1.4 million over seven years as the Canada Research Chair in Multimedia Quality-of-Experience. The program supports outstanding researchers recognized as world leaders in their fields. Wang’s renewed Chair will develop a systematic, AI-driven approach to understanding, enhancing and enriching how people experience images, video and immersive media.
Wang is a world authority on multimedia quality-of-experience (QoE), which is the science of measuring and improving how people perceive visual content. His work has been cited more than 125,000 times. He has received two Engineering Emmy Awards and is a Fellow of the IEEE, the Royal Society of Canada and the Canadian Academy of Engineering. During his first Chair term, his team built an end-to-end framework for measuring and optimizing video quality, which resulted in 19 patents. The technology was commercialized through SSIMWAVE Inc., which Wang co-founded. The company served major media players including Disney Streaming, Warner Bros. Discovery and Comcast, reaching hundreds of millions of viewers worldwide. SSIMWAVE was acquired by IMAX in 2022 and continues to operate in Canada.
His new research responds to two fast-moving fronts: large foundational AI models and the emerging “metaverse.” The content these technologies produce often falls short of what users expect. Wang’s project will create a graph-based deep learning framework that links multimedia content to human experience. It will also build generative models that explain quality judgments the way people reason about them. These tools will be used to create and enhance content ranging from standard images and video to AI-generated media, 360-degree video, point clouds and 3D meshes for virtual and augmented reality. The program will also train highly qualified personnel to carry these technologies into Canadian industry.
Visit Wang’s faculty profile to learn more about his research.
