Lin Inducted into IEEE Virtual Reality Academy

Ming Lin, a Distinguished University Professor of computer science with a joint appointment in the University of Maryland Institute for Advanced Computer Studies, was recently inducted into the IEEE Virtual Reality Academy.

Criteria for selection into the academy include cumulative and momentous contributions to research and/or development; broader influence on the field, the community, and on the work of others; and significant service and/or active participation in the community.

A recognized leader in virtual reality, computer graphics and robotics, Lin’s research focuses on multimodal interaction, physically based animations and simulations, as well as algorithmic robotics and their use in physical and virtual environments. Her work has extensive applications in medical simulations, cancer screening, urban computing, as well as supporting city-scale planning, human-centric computing, intelligent transportation and traffic management.

Lin holds five patents in physics-based sound synthesis and propagation, reconstruction of garments directly from photographs, and estimation of tissues properties using images for cancer detection and diagnosis, with her students and collaborators at the University of North Carolina and Microsoft.

Since becoming an Amazon Scholar in 2020, she filed a patent with collaborators there on 3D garment draping prediction using semi-supervisory learning with training data from 3D cloth simulation. Amazon used this work to launch the first real-time physics-inspired, learning-based, fit-accurate 3D virtual try-on technology in 2021.

Lin is a fellow of the National Academy of Inventors, the Association for Computing Machinery, IEEE and the Eurographics Association. In 2020, she was elected to the Association for Computing Machinery’s Special Interest Group on Graphics and Interactive Techniques (SIGGRAPH) Academy. She also serves on the board of directors of the Computing Research Association’s Committee on Widening Participation in Computing Research.