The Interdisciplinary Research Center (IRC) was founded in September 2013 by Professor Baoquan Chen, focusing mainly on emerging technology pertaining to visual sensing and communication.

Visuals represent the main channel through which humans, or their robotics agents, understand and maneuver through their living environment and interact with each other. IRC brings together disciplines such as computer graphics, computer vision, human-computer interaction (HCI), visualization, and machine learning. Big data, VR (virtual reality) & AR (augmented reality), 3D printing, Robotics, etc, are not simply bandwagons we jump on, but the vehicle we ride with towards a changing world. IRC publishes in top venues such as ACM Transactions on Graphics (TOG), SIGGRAPH, IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics (TVCG), and IEEE VIS.

IRC fosters a truly international research culture, with frequent faculty and student exchanges with universities worldwide, also featuring visiting professors from the U.S., Canada, Israel, Germany, Singapore, Hong Kong, etc. IRC also reaches out to the broad academic community and the fast evolving industry in China. Our inaugural Summer School on Visual Computing was attended by over 1200 undergraduates, graduates, and researchers nationwide from 60 universities of 25 provinces, with sponsors including NVidia. IRC has established a joint laboratory with China Youth Daily, a leading newspaper in China, on computational journalism, and with Iqiyi, a leading online video company, on visual data analysis.

IRC's research is generously sponsored by government and industry. IRC leads the China National Basic Research Initiative (dubbed 973 Plan) on Urban Big Data Computing – how the processing of urban big data, ranging from physical sensors to information systems to user generated contents, can capitalize on the spatial and temporal registration among them to consolidate data, extract semantical information, and ultimately, achieve new insights. Under a China-Israel joint grant, IRC also collaborates closely with Daniel Cohen-Or, Dani Lischinski, and Andrei Sharf on the analysis of social camera captures. Under China-Germany Collaboration Program (PPP), IRC has established an annual exchange program with Stuttgart and Konstanz University, on research concerning visual analytics of big data.

IRCers are the happy crowd that calls IRC home, a place we grow, mature, and thrive. IRC constantly looks out to extend the family by recruiting special individuals like you – whether undergraduates, graduates, PostDocs, or faculty members!