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
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Enhanced Visual Authoring Using Operation History Sara Su Ph.D. Dissertation, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2009 |
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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 |
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QuickSelect: History-Based Selection Expansion Sara Su, Sylvain Paris, Frédo Durand Graphics Interface 2009 |
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Visualizing, Editing, and Inferring Structure in 2D Graphics Sara Su Doctoral Symposium, ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (UIST), 2007 |
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Dead-End Elimination as a Heuristic for Min-Cut Image Segmentation Mala Radhakrishnan, Sara Su IEEE International Conference on Image Processing (ICIP), 2006 |
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De-Emphasis of Distracting Image Regions Using Texture Power Maps Sara Su, Frédo Durand, Maneesh Agrawala ICCV Workshop on Texture Analysis and Synthesis, 2005 |
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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 |
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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 |
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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
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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:
- National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship Program
- MIT Presidential Fellowship Program
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