Principal Research Engineer, Autodesk – California, USA
3D, 3D modeling, 3D reality capture, 3D smart cities—these seem to be the zeitgeist of the present world of AEC and are touted as the path forward that will reap great benefits in engineering efficiencies. Managing and using enormous spatial datasets is a challenge, as anyone who has wrestled with unwieldy lidar point clouds can attest. Among the practical solutions for working with rich 3D data are parametric meshes, automated feature recognition, and machine learning—areas where researcher Yan Fu has focused in her academic career and at Autodesk (where a colleague described her as “future smart”).
Fu earned her Bachelor of Computer Science at Beijing Normal University and her doctorate at Peking University, specializing in digital geometry processing. Fu has also volunteered for initiatives to help bring computer sciences to grade schools and improve the information-technology capabilities of local communities. She has been granted several patents, and her numerous notable papers include pipe reconstruction from unorganized point cloud data, direct sampling on surfaces for high-quality remeshing, boolean operation for freeform models represented in geometry images, and segmentation of ground-based laser scanning points from an urban environment.