Richard Zhang is VP of AI and R&D at Augmenta, leading the company's effort in developing the most advanced AI models and tools for efficient and sustainable building designs. He is also a professor in the School of Computing Science at Simon Fraser University, Canada. He is a Fellow of the IEEE, holds a Distinguished University Professorship, and is a member of the ACM SIGGRAPH Academy. From 2021 to 2025, he was an Amazon Scholar. Richard obtained his Ph.D. from the University of Toronto, and MMath and BMath degrees from the University of Waterloo. His research is in computer graphics and visual computing with special interests in geometric and generative modeling, shape analysis, 3D vision, spatial AI, geometric deep learning, as well as computational design and fabrication.
Awards won by Richard include a Canadian Human-Computer Communications Society Achievement Award in Computer Graphics (2022), a Google Faculty Award (2019), an NSERC Discovery Accelerator Supplement Award (2014), a Best Dataset Award from ChinaGraph (2020), as well as faculty grants/gifts from Adobe, Autodesk, and Google. He and his students and collaborators have won the SIGGRAPH 2025 Test of Time Award, CVPR 2020 Best Student Paper Award, and Best Paper Awards at Symposium on Geometry Processing (SGP) 2008 and CAD/Graphics 2017. Richard is the Technical Papers Chair for SIGGRAPH 2025.
