When Tongyu Zhou, a PhD student at Brown University, started her first Adobe Research internship in 2022, she had no idea that she’d eventually be presenting her work—and bantering with basketball legend Shaquille O’Neal—in front of thousands of people on the Adobe SUMMIT stage in 2024.
Zhou’s graduate work with Brown’s human-computer interaction (HCI) labs focuses on tools for creativity, which is why she often found herself using Adobe products and citing papers from Adobe Research. When she heard about summer internship opportunities, she knew it would be a good way to broaden her experience, so she decided to apply.
Zhou was hired and spent her first summer at Adobe Research working on augmented reality tutorials. “It was a great learning experience in how research in industry works,” she remembers, so she decided to come back for another internship the following summer.
To prepare, Zhou and her Adobe mentor, Research Scientist Gromit Chan, met in the spring to brainstorm project ideas that would combine Zhou’s background in illustration tools with Chan’s expertise in visualization. They hit on the idea of infographics, a research area that melded their interests and offered a lot of opportunities for exploration.
“We realized that there are tools for design and tools for data visualization, but there aren’t many tools that combine both,” explains Zhou.
“If you want to make an infographic, you might make a graph using spreadsheet software, and then move it to Adobe Illustrator. But you have to do a lot of bouncing across software, and you need to be good at design and data science. Instead, we wanted to create a unified system to support people making infographics, no matter where their skills are,” Zhou says.
Zhou’s first internship had been virtual, but this time she joined her fellow interns in the Adobe San Jose offices. She and several other HCI-focused interns shared a working space, which opened up lots of opportunities to exchange ideas. “We bounced ideas off each other, and it was a big motivator to help me be productive,” says Zhou.
By the end of the summer, Zhou, in collaboration with her mentors, had developed a new kind of tool that leverages Adobe’s Firefly generative AI to help users create infographics by simply importing a dataset, entering a short text description of their key message, and then experimenting with color palettes, chart types, graphics, and animations.
“Working with Tongyu was like a never-ending visual feast of beautiful graphics and UI all summer,” remembers Chan. “An infographic design tool needs to produce great visuals for people to want to use it, so we were extremely lucky to have her on this project—she’s both a great researcher and a talented artist.”
From summer project to Sneak
It’s a tradition, at the end of each summer, for Adobe Research interns to submit their projects in hopes of being chosen for Sneaks—the high-profile on-stage technology previews at Adobe Summit. Zhou’s project was selected—and it was the only Summit Sneak in 2024 to have originated solely from an intern research project. Sneaks are often presented on stage by full-time Adobe employees, but since Zhou had done so much of the work to develop Project Infograph It, Chan welcomed her interest in taking the stage. She was up for the challenge.
From there, Zhou jumped into intense pre-Summit preparations, refining her project in collaboration with mentors and an Adobe designer to get the technology stage-ready and bring the interface up to Adobe branding standards. “I went directly from undergrad to my PhD, so I haven’t had a lot of product experience,” says Zhou. “It was really cool to interact with the product, design, and legal teams and see how all of this works. I didn’t realize how much iteration happens as you prepare for a Sneak. It’s just a completely different level from the projects I’d done before.”
Zhou and her collaborators also wanted to have some fun with Infograph It, so they decided to tie the theme of their demo to Summit 2024’s celebrity host, Shaquille O’Neil.
“We thought it would be cool to have all the infographics related to basketball. I invented a fictional basketball star, ‘Shock,’ and we put together synthetic data for our alternate universe. It was great to work on, and kind of funny, since I don’t know a single thing about basketball,” she laughs.
Heading into Summit, Zhou worked with Sneaks coaches twice a week to hone her presentation and delivery. Her biggest fear, she says, was a silent audience. But the crowd cheered and laughed, and Shaq kept everyone engaged by teasing Zhou over “Shock’s” lack of shots by the free-throw line. “He was trying to give me a hard time, and I appreciated that he was playing with it,” says Zhou. “Overall, it was super fun and also nerve-wracking, but I would definitely do it again.”
For his part, Chan was delighted to see Zhou take the stage. “I was incredibly proud as a mentor—I think I was even more nervous, and more excited, than when I presented at Summit two years earlier.”
Taking the research to CHI
In addition to preparing a Sneak, Zhou and her collaborators, Chan and Jeff Huang (Zhou’s advisor at Brown University), co-wrote a paper about the research, Epigraphics: Message-Driven Infographics Authoring. Their work was selected for presentation at the distinguished ACM CHI conference and awarded a best-paper honorable mention.
“Research internships at Adobe are unique because interns own most of the outcome. They put forward original ideas and implement most of the work and submit a high-quality paper to a top-tier conference. As mentors, we feel responsible for maximizing the impact of their efforts by promoting their demos to product teams and helping them publish their papers to prestigious venues like ACM CHI,” says Chan. “We, as mentors, have the opportunity to offer our interns a public platform for sharing and advancing their work, like with Tongyu.”
As Zhou wrapped up her internship and got ready to present it at CHI, she reflected on her time as an Adobe intern. “Usually your research stays research,” she says. “But at Adobe your work has the opportunity to have a huge impact, and even become part of a product, which is really exciting—you have the best of both worlds.”
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