Xinyu Shi

石新羽｜ CS PhD Student

xinyu.shi@uwaterloo.ca

I'm on the job market!

I am actively seeking for tenure-track faculty or postdoc positions in academia and research roles in industry for 2026. Feel free to email me about opportunities that might be a good fit!

Hi, I am Xinyu Shi, a fifth-year Ph.D. candidate at University of Waterloo in Canada. I am lucky to be advised by Prof. Jian Zhao in WVisdom Research Group, affiliated with the WaterlooHCI Lab. During my PhD, I have interned at Adobe Research (twice) and Microsoft Research Asia.

I design new interaction paradigms for AI-powered creativity support tools. The conceptual key to my approach is defining meaning and useful interactive visual abstractions to represent and manipulate visual media. They serve as the interaction mediators between human creators and machine intelligence to enable powerful ways of thinking, communication, and design. My work has been recognized with a Best Paper Award and an Honorable Mention Award at CHI.

Outside of research, I am keen on exploring new possibilities in my life. I love skiing, playing badminton, rock climbing (only belay, no bouldering), and travelling. I have two cats, they are so sweet!

Interests

Human-Computer Interaction
Human-Centered AI
Computational Creativity
Visual Media Authoring

Education

Ph.D. in Computer Science 2021 - Present

University of Waterloo, Canada
B.Eng. in Software Engineering 2016 - 2020

Xiamen University, China

News

2026/02: Our paper Notational Animating received Best Paper Honorable Mention Award at CHI 2026!
2025/11: Gave an invited talk at UCSD Design Lab (Title: Interactive Visual Abstractions for Steerable Creativity)
2025/11: Gave an invited talk at UofT iSchool (Title: Interactive Visual Abstractions for Steerable Creativity)
2025/06: Interning at Adobe Research with Rubaiat, Li-Yi, and Cherry this summer!
2025/01: Our paper about design intent expression, Brickify, is accepted by CHI'25!
2024/05: Interning at Adobe Research (San Jose) with Shunan, Jane, Gromit, and Eunyee this summer.
2024/04: Super excited that Piet won Best Paper Award at CHI24!
2024/01: Two papers are accepted by CHI'24!
2023/11: Passed my Comprehensive Exam II, I am a Ph.D. candidate now!
2023/05: Interning at Microsoft Research Asia (Beijing).
2023/04: Attentding CHI 2023 to present De-Stijl at Hamburg, Germany!
2022/06: FeMaSR is accepted by ACM MM'22 and selected as Oral Presentation.
2022/05: Transferred from M.Math to Ph.D. program.
2021/09: Fortunate to receive the 2021 Vector Scholarship from Vector Institute.
2021/09: Started my journey at University of Waterloo!

PUBLICATIONS

CHI 2026 BEST PAPER HONORABLE MENTION

Notational Animating: An Interactive Approach to Creating and Editing Animation Keyframes

Xinyu Shi, Li-Yi Wei, Nanxuan Zhao, Jian Zhao, Rubaiat Habib Kazi
In Proceedings of the 2026 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems.
PDF Project Page Video DOI

CHI 2025

Brickify: Enabling Expressive Design Intent Specification through Direct Manipulation on Design Tokens

Xinyu Shi, Yinghou Wang, Ryan Rossi, Jian Zhao
In Proceedings of the 2025 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems.
PDF Video 30s Preview DOI

CHI 2024 BEST PAPER AWARD

Piet: Facilitating Color Authoring for Motion Graphics Video

Xinyu Shi, Yinghou Wang, Yun Wang, Jian Zhao
In Proceedings of the 2024 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems.
PDF Video 30s Preview DOI Project Page

CHI 2024

Exploring Interactive Color Palettes for Abstraction-Driven Exploratory Image Colorization

Xinyu Shi, Mingyu Liu, Ziqi Zhou, Ali Neshati, Ryan Rossi, Jian Zhao
In Proceedings of the 2024 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems.
PDF Video 30s Preview DOI

CHI 2023

De-Stijl: Facilitating Graphics Design with Interactive 2D Color Palette Recommendation

Xinyu Shi, Ziqi Zhou, Julia Zhang, Ali Neshati, Anjul Tyagi, Ryan Rossi, Shunan Guo, Fan Du, Jian Zhao
In Proceedings of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems.
PDF Code Video 30s Preview Dataset (3.4G) DOI

MM 2022 ORAL PRESENTATION (TOP 5%)

Real-World Blind Super-Resolution via Feature Matching with Implicit High-Resolution Priors

Chaofeng Chen, Xinyu Shi, Yipeng Qin, Xiaoming Li, Xiaoguang Han, Tao Yang, Shihui Guo
In Proceedings of the 2022 ACM International Conference on Multimedia.
PDF Code DOI

UbiComp 2021 / IMWUT 2020

Teaching American Sign Language in Mixed Reality

Qijia Shao, Amy Sniffen, Julien Blanchet, Megan E. Hillis, Xinyu Shi, Themistoklis K. Haris, Jason Liu, Melissa Malzkuhn, Lorna C. Quandt, James Mahoney, David J.M. Kraemer, Xia Zhou, Devin Balkcom
In Proceedings of the ACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies.
PDF Video DOI

ISMAR 2019

Accurate and Fast Classification of Foot Gestures for Virtual Locomotion

Xinyu Shi, Junjun Pan, Zeyong Hu, Juncong Lin, Shihui Guo, Minghong Liao, Ye Pan, Ligang Liu
In Proceedings of the 2019 IEEE International Symposium on Mixed and Augmented Reality.
PDF Video DOI

EXTENDED ABSTRACTS, WORKSHOPS

NeurIPS Workshop 2025 SPOTLIGHT

BrowseComp-Plus: A More Fair and Transparent Evaluation Benchmark of Deep-Research Agent

Zijian Chen*, Xueguang Ma*, Shengyao Zhuang*, Ping Nie, Kai Zou, Andrew Liu, Joshua Green, Kshama Patel, Ruoxi Meng, Mingyi Su, Sahel Sharifymoghaddam, Yanxi Li, Haoran Hong, Xinyu Shi, Xuye Liu, Nandan Thakur, Crystina Zhang, Luyu Gao, Wenhu Chen, Jimmy Lin
NeurIPS 2025 MTI-LLM Workshop.
Code Paper

CHI LBW 2025

Comprehensive Sketching: Exploring Infographic Design Alternatives in Parallel

Xinyu Shi, Shunan Guo, Jane Hoffswell, Gromit Yeuk-Yin Chan, Victor S. Bursztyn, Jian Zhao, Eunyee Koh
In Extended Abstracts of the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems.
PDF Video DOI

CONTACT

xinyu.shi@uwaterloo.ca
200 Ring Rd, Waterloo, Ontario N2L 3G1