About
I'm Weihao Qiu. I build things that have to work in front of someone — a diagnostic device in a clinic, an installation in a gallery — and I build most of the stack myself, from firmware up through the model to the screen. Ph.D. in Media Arts and Technology from UC Santa Barbara, B.E. in Computer Science (IoT) from Xi'an Jiaotong University.
I'm currently a Senior Research Engineer at Aptitude Medical Systems, where I architect end-to-end point-of-care diagnostic platforms — from embedded hardware and firmware to cloud-connected software. Previously, I developed autonomous drone cinematography systems (IEEE ICRA) and built real-time interactive AI pipelines for creative applications at Nexus Studios.
My work has been published and presented at NeurIPS, CHI, SIGGRAPH, IEEE ICRA, and Ars Electronica, and exhibited at institutions including M+ Museum and the National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts.
How I work
Whatever the thing needs. I've written the firmware, trained the model, built the interface, and hung the show. I don't choose work by whether it falls inside a specialty — I choose it by whether it needs doing. Most of what I'm proud of came from picking up the part nobody else wanted to own.
Models are components, not magic. My dissertation was on orchestrating generative models, which mostly meant learning where they break — what a pose-conditioned diffusion pipeline does at the edge of its training set, why AI imagery drifts toward sameness, how much you have to hand-code to get artistic control back. I use AI tools heavily and without ceremony. Refusing them to prove I can do it by hand would be a hobby, not a discipline; not knowing what's inside them would be worse.
Taste is part of the engineering. A diagnostic reader and a gallery installation have the same problem underneath: someone has to stand in front of it and understand what is happening. How a thing looks and reads is a requirement, not a finish applied at the end.
What I work on
- Generative models — training, conditioning, and orchestrating them into a pipeline that holds up live
- Computer vision and autonomous systems, from drones to point-of-care instruments
- Real-time graphics and interactive installations
- The full stack under all of it — embedded firmware, backend, frontend
- Making data legible: visualization, and interfaces people read without a manual
Education
- Ph.D. in Media Arts & Technology — UC Santa Barbara, 2025. Emphasis: advanced computation in data visualization and generative AI art
- M.S. in Media Arts & Technology — UC Santa Barbara, 2018
- B.E. in Computer Science (IoT) — Xi'an Jiaotong University, 2015
Selected Publications
- "Fencing Hallucination — Increasing Artistic Control in Interactive Media Arts by Merging AI Models with Hand-coded Programs" — Ars Electronica, Expanded Animation, 2024
- "Fencing Hallucination" — NeurIPS 2023, Creative AI Track, 2023
- With George Legrady. "Combating the 'Sameness' in AI Art: Reflections on the Interactive AI Installation Fencing Hallucination" — NeurIPS 2023 Workshop on Machine Learning for Creativity and Design, 2023
- "Fencing Hallucination: An Interactive Installation for Fencing with AI and Synthesizing Chronophotographs" — CHI 2023 Extended Abstracts, 2023
- "An Autonomous Drone Cinematography System for Action Scenes" — IEEE ICRA, 2018
Selected Exhibitions
- Digital Terraforming — M+ Museum, Hong Kong, 2025 (with Guo Cheng)
- α-Forest — A multi-sensory healing experience — National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts, U-108 Space, Taichung, January–April 2025 (with Timothy Wood, Olifa Hsieh)
- TAISAH — A Song of Your Dream — Soft AI+M, MAT End of Year Show, UCSB, 2024 (with Timothy Wood, Olifa Hsieh)
- Attention Manifold — Soft AI+M, MAT End of Year Show, UCSB, 2024
- Fencing Hallucination — NeurIPS Creative AI Track, New Orleans, 2023
- Synaptic Time Tunnel — SIGGRAPH 2023, Los Angeles (with transLab, MAT, UCSB)
- Abstract Oracle Miner 0001460528 — ARE YOU FOR REAL, Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen, Germany, 2023 (with Guo Cheng)
- HSL Transformation — SYSMADES, MAT End of Year Show, UCSB, 2019
- Machinery Interference — Xcelerator Super Collision, Times Art Museum, Beijing, 2018 (with Rodger Luo)
- Exposure & Light — MOXI, Santa Barbara, 2018
Experience
- Senior Research Engineer — Aptitude Medical Systems, Goleta, 2025–present
- Research Assistant — Orfalea Center for Global & International Studies, UCSB, 2023–2025
- R&D Intern — Aptitude Medical Systems, 2024
- R&D Intern — Nexus Studios, Los Angeles, 2022
- Teaching Assistant — Multiple depts. at UCSB, 2017–2023
- Instructor — Creative Coding, HelloUp Design Education, 2019–2021