Since May 2009, I have been a post-doctoral researcher with Frédo Durand in the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. I completed my Ph.D. (2009) and M.S. (2005) with Frédo in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. I received a B.S. in Computer Engineering (2002) from the University of Washington.

Starting September 2009, I will be a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Tufts University. (As of August, content is still migrating to my Tufts page.)

My research interests lie in computer graphics and human computer interaction. I am interested in developing interaction techniques to support user productivity and creativity. In my thesis, I proposed methods for using operation history to improve the user experience and demonstrated these in the context of visual authoring. (See summaries of recent projects and a list of publications.) During my studies, I have enjoyed working closely with researchers at Adobe and Microsoft.

In 2006, I had the great opportunity to teach Introduction to Computer Science with the Women's Technology Program, an MIT initiative to encourage high school girls to consider careers in science and technology.

Research

Enhanced Visual Authoring Using Operation History
Sara Su
Ph.D. Dissertation, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2009
Interactive Visual Histories for Vector Graphics
Sara Su, Sylvain Paris, Fred Aliaga, Craig Scull, Steve Johnson, Frédo Durand
Technical Report MIT-CSAIL-TR-2009-031, 2009
QuickSelect: History-Based Selection Expansion
Sara Su, Sylvain Paris, Frédo Durand
Graphics Interface 2009
Visualizing, Editing, and Inferring Structure in 2D Graphics
Sara Su
Doctoral Symposium, ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (UIST), 2007
Dead-End Elimination as a Heuristic for Min-Cut Image Segmentation
Mala Radhakrishnan, Sara Su
IEEE International Conference on Image Processing (ICIP), 2006
De-Emphasis of Distracting Image Regions Using Texture Power Maps
Sara Su, Frédo Durand, Maneesh Agrawala
ICCV Workshop on Texture Analysis and Synthesis, 2005
Perceptual Picture Emphasis Using Texture Power Maps
Sara Su
Master's Thesis, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2005
Awarded Levin Prize for Best Thesis Presentation in Computer Science
A Hybrid Approach to Rendering Handwritten Characters
Sara Su, Chenyu Wu, Ying-Qing Xu, Heung-Yeung Shum
International Conference on Computer Graphics, Visualization, and Computer Vision, 2004
Simulating Artistic Brushstrokes Using Interval Splines
Sara Su, Ying-Qing Xu, Heung-Yeung Shum, Falai Chen
International Conference on Computer Graphics and Imaging, 2002

Teaching

Introduction to Computer Science with Java
Instructor, Summer 2006 (Syllabus)
I had full classroom responsibilities for this course offered through the EECS Department. The Women's Technology Program encourages high school girls to study computer science and provides a hands-on introduction to the field.

Support

I am grateful to the following organizations for their financial support:

At UW, I benefited from the generosity of the Washington NASA Space Grant Consortium, the Mary Gates Endowment (through an Undergraduate Merit Scholarship), and the Boeing Company (through a National Merit Scholarship).


Updated August 18, 2009