Emilie Yu

Emilie Yu

post doctoral researcher at UCSB

I am a post doctoral researcher in the Expressive Computation Lab  supervised by Professor Jennifer Jacobs. I am interested in how people use technology and machines for artistic expression and crafts, and in questioning how computational methods can be useful to them. I explore this question through the design of software artifacts, through my own creative practice in using software and making things, and through interactions with expert practitioners. My field of interests span creativity support tools, digital representations of 3D shape, computer-aided manufacturing, and textile crafts.

I completed a PhD at Inria Université Côte d’Azur in Dec 2023, where I worked in the GraphDeco team  supervised by Adrien Bousseau . I received the French Informatics Society (SIF) dissertation award and the French Computer Graphics Association dissertation award. I was a recipient of the MITACS Globalink Research Award in 2023, which funded a 3-month visit of the dgp lab  at the University of Toronto where I worked with Fanny Chevalier  and Karan Singh . I received a MSc in Digital Media Engineering at the Technical University of Denmark, a MSc and BSc in Engineering at CentraleSupélec.

News

Apr 2025
Our paper on modular crochet granny square garments has been conditionally accepted to DIS 2025!
Feb 2025
I served on the DIS Pictorials Committee.
Oct 2024
I presented my dissertation work at the yearly French Computer Graphics conference JFIG 2024. >>
Aug 2024
I served on the TEI Papers Committee.

// Research

texTile: Making and Re-making Crochet Granny Square Garments Through Computational Design and 3D-printed Connectors/

texTile: Making and Re-making Crochet Granny Square Garments Through Computational Design and 3D-printed Connectors

ACM Conference on Designing Interactive Systems (DIS) - 2025

texTile is a modular fashion workflow that enables designers to assemble reusable crochet tiles into garments. To support this workflow, we developed digitally fabricated connectors for easy assembly and disassembly, a custom pattern solver and user interface to guide garment design, and a visualization tool to help plan manual assembly and reassembly.

3D-Layers: Bringing Layer-Based Color Editing to VR Painting /

3D-Layers: Bringing Layer-Based Color Editing to VR Painting

ACM Transactions on Graphics (SIGGRAPH) - 2024

VR artists create beautiful 3D paintings with colored 3D brushstrokes. We investigate how the paradigm of ``painting layers’’ could translate to the 3D painting space to achieve non-destructive color editing effects.

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PhD Thesis: Designing Tools for 3D Content Authoring Based on 3D Sketching/

PhD Thesis: Designing Tools for 3D Content Authoring Based on 3D Sketching

3D strokes: what are they? what can we use them for?

VideoDoodles: Hand-Drawn Animations on Videos with Scene-Aware Canvases/

VideoDoodles: Hand-Drawn Animations on Videos with Scene-Aware Canvases

ACM Transactions on Graphics (SIGGRAPH) - 2023

We study how artists create VideoDoodles (mix of video and hand-drawn animation) and propose a novel user interface to simplify this task based on depth and motion priors.

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Piecewise-Smooth Surface Fitting onto Unstructured 3D Sketches/

Piecewise-Smooth Surface Fitting onto Unstructured 3D Sketches

ACM Transactions on Graphics (SIGGRAPH) - 2022

We propose a method to transform unstructured 3D sketches into piecewise smooth surfaces that preserve sketched geometric features.

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CASSIE: Curve And Surface Sketching in Immersive Environments/

CASSIE: Curve And Surface Sketching in Immersive Environments

ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI) - 2021

We prototype a 3D sketching interface in VR, where the user’s strokes are automatically neatened to form a well-connected curve network. We additionnaly infer and create surface patches on the sketch, making it possible to create a 3D surface from a few 3D brush strokes.

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MSc Thesis: Interactive 3D Sketching in Virtual Reality/

MSc Thesis: Interactive 3D Sketching in Virtual Reality

During my MSc thesis at DTU supervised by Andreas Bærentzen, Adrien Bousseau and Tibor Stanko, I implemented a VR sketching application in Unity and experimented with automatic neatening of strokes, formation of curve networks from the strokes, and infering surface patches. We finally conducted a small remote user study. This work was the basis for our next paper, CASSIE.

// Projects

Simulation of Differential Growth/

Simulation of Differential Growth

Inspired by awesome generative artists such as Nervous System and inconvergent, I built a web application simulating the penomenon of differential growth on a surface. My goal was to build an interactive tool to grow organic looking surfaces. The outcome of this project was this live demo in the browser (you can try it) and some 3D prints!

Voxel Editor/

Voxel Editor

For the final project of DTU course 02561 Computer graphics, we set out to build a simple voxel editor. This is a Javascript/WebGL project, with a pretty barebone UI. My favorite part was working on the picking interaction for creation and deletion of voxels.

Music and travel videos - Globeshakers Project/

Music and travel videos - Globeshakers Project

I was very lucky to embark on a 6 months trip with a group of friends, during which we travelled the world and played music in the streets and bars, as a brassband. I was the reporter of the team, so I documented those precious moments, directed video clips and edited all of that into some videos.

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// Contact