Dandan Shan selected for Rackham fellowships

Dandan Shan, a graduate student in the Computer Science and Engineering program, has received a Rackham International Student Fellowship and Chia-Lun Lo Fellowship for 2021-22. Dandan is currently a second-year PhD student working with Professor David Fouhey.

Dandan is interested in research on hand-object interaction, video, 3D, summarization and generating creative content. She has recently been working on learning systems for hand and in-contact object detection and segmentation. This has included building a large-scale YouTube video dataset (100 Days of Hands) of daily activities using hands, building an intelligent hand system that predicts rich hand characteristics and detects in-contact objects, and designing a model to segment hand and hand-held objects. 

She has recently published two papers related to this work with Prof. Fouhey: COHESIV: Contrastive Object and Hand Embedding Segmentation In Video, which was presented at the Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS 2021), and Understanding Human Hands in Contact at Internet Scale, which was presented at CVPR 2020.

Dandan is currently an organizer for the division’s AI Seminar Series and the webmaster for the ECSEL+ student group. She has previously served as the coordinator for the Computer Vision Reading Group and designed the webpage for Computer Vision labs at UMich. In 2020 and 2021, Dandan has also contributed as a project instructor at U-M’s AI4ALL summer program for high school students.

The Rackham International Student Fellowship assists outstanding international students, particularly those who may be ineligible for other kinds of support because of citizenship. In addition, the Chia-Lun Lo Fellowship assists outstanding students in Rackham programs who have earned a previous degree from a university in Taiwan. These fellowships are awarded in a combined competition. To be eligible, international graduate students must have a strong academic record, be making good progress toward the degree, and demonstrate outstanding academic and professional promise.