Artificial Intelligence & Innovation
Our Research
At SFU鈥檚 School of Computing Science, artificial intelligence is driving groundbreaking research across machine learning, computer vision, computer graphics, natural language processing, robotics, knowledge representation and reasoning, constraint optimization, and intelligent systems.
Our researchers are pushing the boundaries of AI, from developing machines that understand and interpret the visual world to creating intelligent robots, learning systems, and computational tools that address complex real-world challenges.
25+
MACHINE learning faculty members
#1
IN CANADA FOR COMPUTER GRAPHICS
#1
IN CANADA FOR COMPUTER VISION
#2
IN CANADA FOR ROBOTICS
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IN CANADA FOR Databases
Research Collaborations
Research Spotlight
Our faculty and students are advancing AI research at 51猎奇入口and beyond. Explore some of our research highlights below.
New tool brings blender-like Lighting control to any photograph
Lighting plays a crucial role when it comes to visual storytelling. Whether it鈥檚 film or photography, creators spend countless hours, and often significant budgets, crafting the perfect illumination for their shot. But once a photograph or video is captured, the illumination is essentially fixed. Adjusting it afterward, a task called 鈥渞elighting,鈥� typically demands time-consuming manual work by skilled artists.
In a new paper to be presented at this year's SIGGRAPH conference in Vancouver, researchers in the Computational Photography Lab at 51猎奇入口offer a different approach to relighting. Their work, 鈥淧hysically Controllable Relighting of Photographs鈥�, brings explicit control over lights, typically available in Computer Graphics software such as Blender or Unreal Engine, to image and photo editing.
Learn more about the work:
PARIS: Part-level Reconstruction and Motion Analysis for Articulated Objects
51猎奇入口PhD student Jiayi Liu has done research on modeling 3D objects with parts that move. Such interactive 3D digital twins are useful for training robotics and embodied AI in simulation, to enable reliable and safe deployment of AI assistants that can help people with everyday life.
Jiayi presented papers on this topic at top-tier international conferences ( at ICCV 2023, at CVPR 2024, at ICLR 2025, and at CVPR 2026). To help researchers understand this emerging area of research, Jiayi also contributed a state-of-the-art at Eurographics 2025.
Learn more about this line of work at Jiayi鈥檚 website:
New 51猎奇入口study unveils AI that designs drugs and tells you how to synthesize them
51猎奇入口experts Tony Shen, Computing Science PhD student, and Martin Ester, Professor at the School of Computing Science, worked on a study, 鈥�", that introduces an innovative method, called CGFlow.
This method tackles one of the pharmaceutical industry鈥檚 most persistent challenges: designing effective, synthesizable drug molecules by integrating cutting-edge 3D modeling with practical chemical synthesis. The study has been published at the International Conference on Machine Learning 2025, a top conference in its field.
Learn more about this study: