About Me

I am a staff research scientist at Google, working closely with Cordelia Schmid and Kevin Murphy. I have received my Ph.D. from University of Southern California in 2015, advised by Prof. Ram Nevatia. During graduate school, I was lucky enough to work with Sanketh Shetty and Rahul Sukthankar at Google Research; Lubomir Bourdev, Ronan Collobert and Manohar Paluri at Facebook AI Research. Before coming to the U.S., I received my bachelor degree in Computer Science at Tsinghua University in 2011. And even before that, I attended Yaohua High School in Tianjin, China.

My research focus is on video understanding, with the goal to build machine intelligence that understands and anticipates human activities, and ultimately develop autonomous machines that interact with and assist us in unconstrained environments. My research has been recognized by two winning entries at COCO object detection challenge 2016 and iNaturalist challenge 2017, a best paper finalist at CVPR 2019 and media coverage from WIRED, TechCrunch, etc.

Here are a few representative recent publications:

Self-supervised and Cross-modal Learning

• Chen Sun, Austin Myers, Carl Vondrick, Kevin Murphy and Cordelia Schmid. VideoBERT: A Joint Model for Video and Language Representation Learning. ICCV 2019. [arXiv] [Blog] [VentureBeat]

• Chen Sun, Fabien Baradel, Kevin Murphy and Cordelia Schmid. Learning Video Representations using Contrastive Bidirectional Transformer. [arXiv]

Behavior Prediction for Interacting Agents

• Chen Sun, Per Karlsson, Jiajun Wu, Joshua B. Tenenbaum, and Kevin Murphy, Stochastic Prediction of Multi-Agent Interactions from Partial Observations. ICLR 2019. [arXiv]

• Chen Sun, Abhinav Shrivastava, Carl Vondrick, Rahul Sukthankar, Kevin Murphy and Cordelia Schmid. Relational Action Forecasting. CVPR 2019 (best paper finalist). [arXiv]

Detailed Video Understanding

• Chen Sun, Abhinav Shrivastava, Saurabh Singh, and Abhinav Gupta, Revisiting Unreasonable Effectiveness of Data in Deep Learning Era. ICCV 2017 (spotlight). [arXiv] [Blog] [WIRED]

• Chen Sun, Abhinav Shrivastava, Carl Vondrick, Kevin Murphy, Rahul Sukthankar and Cordelia Schmid. Actor-centric Relation Network. ECCV 2018. [arXiv]

For a full list please refer to my Google Scholar page.