Ava Pun

Ava Pun

Hi, my name is Ava! I’m an undergraduate Computer Science and Combinatorics & Optimization student at the University of Waterloo. I’m interested in applying techniques from across computer graphics, computer vision, and artificial intelligence to craft better tools for visual artists.

Currently, I am researching neural inverse rendering at the autonomous vehicle startup Waabi Innovation (previously Uber ATG). I also coach the European Girls’ Olympiad in Informatics (EGOI) Team Canada, and I am the creator of the science webcomic Academy 118.

I sometimes do photography.

Recent research

Neural Lighting Simulation for Urban Scenes

Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) 2023
Ava Pun*, Gary Sun*, Jingkang Wang*, Yun Chen, Ze Yang, Sivabalan Manivasagam, Wei-Chiu Ma, Raquel Urtasun
Different outdoor illumination conditions drastically alter the appearance of urban scenes, and can harm the performance of image-based robot perception systems if they have not been seen during training. Towards this goal, we propose LightSim, a neural lighting camera simulation system that enables diverse, realistic, and controllable data generation. LightSim automatically builds relightable digital twins at scale from collected raw sensor data…

A Compact Representation for AVL Trees

arXiv preprint, 2023
Jeremy Chizewer*, Stephen Melczer*, J. Ian Munro*, Ava Pun*
We use arithmetic codes to create a static representation of AVL trees—a class of self-balancing binary search trees—using less than 0.99933 bits per node. Our encoding supports efficient full traversal of the tree. To evaluate how close to optimal our encoding is, we derive asymptotics for the information theoretic lower-bound on the number of bits needed to store AVL trees…

AdvSim: Generating Safety-Critical Scenarios for Self-Driving Vehicles

Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) 2021
Jingkang Wang, Ava Pun, James Tu, Sivabalan Manivasagam, Abbas Sadat, Sergio Casas, Mengye Ren, Raquel Urtasun
As self-driving systems become better, simulating scenarios where the autonomy stack may fail becomes more important. Traditionally, those scenarios are generated for a few scenes with respect to the planning module that takes ground-truth actor states as input. This does not scale and cannot identify all possible autonomy failures, such as perception failures due to occlusion. In this paper, we propose AdvSim, an adversarial framework to generate safety-critical scenarios…
AdvSim: Generating Safety-Critical Scenarios for Self-Driving Vehicles

*Denotes equal contribution or alphabetical order.

Latest blog posts

How to Build a Computer Using Photoshop Actions

A Turing machine implemented in Adobe Photoshop
  Ava Pun  •    Oct 14, 2023  •   10 min   computer-science  turing-machine  photoshop 
In this second instalment of Using Digital Art Programs for Unintended Purposes, I present you with a working computer programmed using Adobe Photoshop Actions. To be specific, this computer is a Turing machine—an abstract machine capable of running any computer algorithm. I’ll show you how to create this machine by using layer blend modes and the Invert command to perform logical computations.…

Conway’s Game of Life Implemented in Clip Studio Paint

  Ava Pun  •    Sep 15, 2023  •   8 min   computer-science  game-of-life  clip-studio-paint 
This is Conway’s Game of Life, implemented using the popular drawing software Clip Studio Paint (CSP). No, I’m not using the animation features in CSP, and I’m not drawing these pictures myself. Each frame is computed by Clip Studio Paint within the CSP file. The game advances every time you hit Save. How did I manage to squeeze this functionality out of a program that isn’t supposed to let you do anything more than edit images? Read on…