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Assistant Professor

University of Cambridge

Email: sw2181 AT cam.ac.uk

Elliott / Shangzhe Wu

I am an incoming Assistant Professor in the Department of Engineering at the University of Cambridge starting in March 2025. I'm building a research group focusing on modeling the dynamic physical 3D world from images and will be looking for PhD students to start in October 2025. If you are interested in joining us and have experience in 3D computer vision, generative models, and/or computer graphics, please apply to the PhD in Engineering program by the funding deadline on December 3, 2024.

To PhD applicants: Cambridge enforces a strict deadline for recommendation letters—all letters must be submitted by the application deadline, unlike many American schools which often allow late submissions of recommendation letters. If you have submitted an application by Dec 3, listed me as a potential supervisor, and wish to confirm that your application is complete and eligible for funding competition, send me a short email.

My current research focuses on 3D/4D computer vision and inverse rendering. I'm particularly fascinated by symmetries and structures in nature, as well as how they connect to the way we make sense of our perceptual experiences. A fundamental goal of my research is to build generative models of the physical natural world, capturing distributions of physical properties (e.g., 3D shape, motion, reflectance) from raw, casual multimodal observations (e.g., Internet photos, videos, audio) without direct supervision.

I obtained my PhD from Oxford VGG, advised by Andrea Vedaldi and Christian Rupprecht, and BSc in Computer Science from HKUST, working with Chi-Keung Tang and Yu-Wing Tai. I also spent 1.5 years at Stanford University, working as a postdoc with Jiajun Wu.


Highlights:

Jun 2025: We are organizing three workshops at CVPR 2025: Workshop on 4D Vision, 5th CV4Animals Workshop, and Workshop on Visual Concepts.

Oct 2024: Humbled to receive the ECVA PhD Award!

Nov 2023: Honored to receive the BMVA Sullivan Doctoral Thesis Prize!

Jun 2020: Our work on Unsup3D received the Best Paper Award at CVPR 2020!


Recent Talks:

[2024/05] Physical Natural World from Images

[2023/12] Learning 3D Fauna and Flora in the Wild


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