Faculty
Spotlight on Angel Chang: International Day of Women & Girls in Science
Her journey into computing science began with her mother, who sparked her interest in programming at a young age. “When we first moved to the USA, my mom would entertain me by showing me how to use BASIC to move a 'Rosa the rabbit' character across the screen.”
This early exposure stirred Angel’s interest in coding, and by high school, she was developing software for the academic decathlon, creating small programs to visualize different sorting algorithms, and exploring fractals. It was only natural for her to continue studying computer science in college.
Now an associate professor at SFU Computing Science, Angel Chang describes computer science as exciting. The field is constantly evolving with new developments that transform society (PCs, the internet, AI). Living in the age of deep learning and AI where amazing applications like chatbots, models that generate images, and 3D shapes and scenes from simple text exist—shows the practicality of the field, offering the chance to expand your imagination and create anything that comes to mind.
Chang’s research focuses on connecting language to visual and 3D representations and building intelligent agents that can understand language instructions in 3D environments. In popular imagination, household robots are often envisioned that we can instruct to “bring me my red mug from the kitchen” or ask “where are my glasses?”. For a robot to execute such an instruction or answer such a question, it needs to parse and interpret natural language, understand the 3D environment (e.g., what objects exist and how they are described), navigate to locate the target object, and then formulate an appropriate response.
To tackle this, Chang has established tasks and benchmarks for localizing and describing 3D objects in scans, as well as building simulation frameworks to train such embodied AI agents. These works have enabled follow-up research on understanding language in 3D and investigating embodied AI agents. She has contributed to several 3D datasets that have fostered the development of 3D deep learning and has worked on some of the first efforts to generate 3D shapes and 3D scenes from language.
Outside of her work on language and 3D, Angel is exploring the use of machine learning (ML) to help biologists categorize and monitor the biodiversity of our planet. The BIOSCAN project is part of a larger international collaboration led by the International Barcode of Life (iBOL) Consortium. Through this effort, the team hopes to encourage more machine learning researchers to apply their expertise to this important problem, so they can build advanced tools that help us understand the current biodiversity of the world, measure how it is changing, and develop strategies for preserving the richness of life on Earth.
Chang’s work has been widely recognized, and she has been named a CIFAR AI chair, which gives her the opportunity to collaborate and interact with some of the best AI researchers in Canada and globally. Her work on 3D datasets in ShapeNet and ScanNet has been recognized with the Symposium on Geometry Processing (SGP) dataset award.
Growing up, Chang didn't faced the common biases or stereotypes (e.g., that women are not as good at math as men) that may deter some girls from pursuing computer science. However, her advancement in the field hasn’t always come easily.
“Later in my studies, I realized that I was limited by not having well-known female role models to look up to. Most of the famous computer scientists I learned about were not people I could directly relate to, which limited my imagination of what I could potentially do. Perhaps due to that, I never really imagined being a professor and teaching computer science.”
Another challenge Chang faced was overcoming shyness. “I was very introverted. Public speaking and being comfortable in social situations were big hurdles for me at first, but I can now say that, with a bit of a push, I have mostly overcome this challenge.”
Given the tremendous transformation that computing has brought to all walks of life in recent years, Chang hopes to see more women interested in computer science over the next decade.
“There are now many ways to engage with computing that are not limited to the traditional 'computer scientist' or 'computer programmer' roles. Computing now plays a part in every vocation (biologists, doctors, journalists, etc.), and understanding and appropriately leveraging technological advances is key to bringing social good for all.”
Professor Chang joined SFU's School of Computimg Science in 2019. Prior to this, she was a visiting research scientist at Facebook AI Research and a research scientist at Eloquent Labs working on dialogue. She received my Ph.D. in Computer Science from Stanford, where I was part of the Natural Language Processing Group and advised by Chris Manning.