PeopleofSuperintelligence

Researcher

Humphrey Shi

Humphrey Shi is a computer vision researcher whose work spans multimodal AI, image segmentation, and video generation. He earned an engineering physics degree at Tsinghua in 2009 and master's and doctoral degrees in electrical and computer engineering at UIUC in 2016 and 2017, then worked at IBM and became an assistant professor at Oregon. His work includes OneFormer, a universal image segmentation framework, and Text2Video-Zero, which adapts text-to-image diffusion models for video generation. He founded Picsart AI Research, led a team developing AI for creative communication, received the NSF CAREER Award in 2023, and joined Georgia Tech as an associate professor. Since November 2025, he is NVIDIA's vice president of High-Performance AI and a Georgia Tech associate professor.

Badges

Timeline

  1. 2005–2017

    Engineering physics and an ECE doctorate

    He earns a B.E. in engineering physics at Tsinghua University in 2009 and M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in electrical and computer engineering at UIUC in 2016 and 2017.

  2. November 2017–December 2019

    Computer vision at IBM

    From November 2017 to December 2019, he works as a research staff member in computer vision at IBM's T. J. Watson Research Center.

  3. 2019–2023

    Assistant professor at Oregon

    From 2019 to 2023, he is an assistant professor of computer science at the University of Oregon. His research focuses on multimodal AI that combines images, video, audio, geometry, and text.

  4. February 2021–April 2025

    Chief scientist at Picsart

    From February 2021 to April 2025, he serves as chief scientist at Picsart and founder of Picsart AI Research. He leads scientists, engineers, and creatives developing AI for creative communication.

  5. 2022

    OneFormer unifies segmentation

    In 2022, he coauthors OneFormer, a universal image segmentation framework that unifies semantic, instance, and panoptic segmentation in a multi-task train-once design.

  6. 2023

    Text2Video-Zero for video generation

    In 2023, he coauthors Text2Video-Zero, a low-cost approach that uses existing text-to-image diffusion methods for video generation without added training or optimization.

  7. 2023

    A Georgia Tech professorship

    In 2023, he joins Georgia Tech's School of Interactive Computing as an associate professor after receiving the NSF CAREER Award in June 2023.

  8. Since November 2025

    Vice president of AI at NVIDIA

    In November 2025, he becomes NVIDIA's vice president of High-Performance AI and continues as an associate professor in Georgia Tech's School of Interactive Computing. As of October 2026, he leads work on high-performance, multimodal, and agentic AI across models, kernels, compilers, and hardware.

Career

  1. Since 2025NVIDIAVice President of High-Performance AI
  2. Since 2023Georgia Institute of TechnologyAssociate Professor
  3. 2021–2025PicsartChief Scientist, Founder
  4. 2019–2023University of OregonAssistant Professor
  5. 2017–2019IBM ResearchResearch Staff Member

Education

  1. 2017University of Illinois Urbana-ChampaignPh.D.
  2. 2016University of Illinois Urbana-ChampaignM.S.
  3. 2009Tsinghua UniversityB.E.

From the biography.

  1. 16% of AI career moves in the 2020s went from a university to a companyIncludes Humphrey Shi. We estimate that 16% of AI career moves in the 2020s went from a university to a company; 29% of moves starting at a university went to a company, and 76% ended the university role.
  2. 11% of AI doctorate holders from 2010 to 2016 founded or led a company or lab by 10 years after graduationIncludes Humphrey Shi. We estimate how often AI doctorate holders founded or led a company or lab by 10 years after graduation, how waiting times compare between founders and top jobs, and which universities trained the most.
  3. 23% of people shaping AI who left a university for a company later returned to a universityIncludes Humphrey Shi. We estimate that 468 of the 2,011 people shaping AI who left a university for a company (23%) later returned to a university after a median of 5 years, and 163 of 829 (20%) made the reverse round trip.
  4. Google has the highest combined h-index among AI organizationsIncludes NVIDIA. We estimate that Google holds the highest combined h-index at 8,016, while universities account for 73% of the deduplicated total across AI organizations.

Colleagues

People with dated positions at the same organization in the same years.

Sources and credits

Photo: We have no published photo of Humphrey Shi yet. Send us a free-licensed photo.

  1. Humphrey Shi | Electrical & Computer Engineering | Illinois ece.illinois.edu. Checked 21 October 2026.
  2. Incoming Associate Professor Takes Holistic View of AI and Computer Vision | College of Computing cc.gatech.edu. Checked 21 October 2026.
  3. Humphrey Shi | School of Interactive Computing ic.gatech.edu. Checked 21 October 2026.
  4. OneFormer: One Transformer to Rule Universal Image Segmentation arxiv.org. Checked 21 October 2026.
  5. Text2Video-Zero: Text-to-Image Diffusion Models are Zero-Shot Video Generators arxiv.org. Checked 21 October 2026.
  6. Author: Humphrey Shi | NVIDIA Technical Blog developer.nvidia.com. Checked 21 October 2026.