About me

I was born and raised in Hong Kong, and moved to Vancouver, Canada for my undergraduate studies. I received a BA with a double major in Computer Science and Psychology at UBC in 2020. While I was at UBC, I became deeply involved in the UBC Visual Cognition Lab (VCL), led by Prof. Ron Rensink. The projects I worked on included one about robust inattentional blindness (NOVA) and one about mental representations of space (Image Transitions). I became project leader for both the NOVA and Image Transitions projects from 2018 to 2021, training new volunteers whilst running experiments and performing data analysis for various psychophysics experiments.

During my undergraduate years, I also joined Prof. Cristina Conati's lab to work on an HCI project, dynamic text-link interventions to improve text readability. I joined in the summer of 2019 as a NSERC USRA student, but continued working in the lab until I graduated.

After I graduated from UBC, I took a gap year to continue working at the VCL. I joined Prof. John Tsotsos's lab at York University in 2021 as a Master's student in the EECS department. For my Master's thesis, I worked on exploring viewpoint selection during active visual search in a real-world, 3D environment. I decided to continue as a PhD student with John, and I am now working on the Selective Tuning Model of attention, extending it to include viewpoint selection, as well as modelling an executive attention controller for Selective Tuning.

Outside of research, you can find me playing with my dog, bouldering outdoors, and performing ballet on stage.

Publications

Paper publications

Lallé, S., Wu, T., & Conati, C. (2020, October). Gaze-driven links for magazine style narrative visualizations. In 2020 IEEE Visualization Conference (VIS) (pp. 166-170). IEEE.[pdf]

Wu, T., & Tsotsos, J. K. (2025). Real-world visual search goes beyond eye movements: Active searchers select 3D scene viewpoints too. bioRxiv, 2025-02.[pdf]

Posters

Wu, T., & Tsotsos, J. K. (2024). Viewpoint selection in active visual search. Journal of Vision, 24(10), 328-328.[pdf]

Wu, T., & Tsotsos, J. K. (2023). Active visual search in a 3D real world environment. Journal of Vision, 23(9), 4713-4713.[pdf]

Master's Thesis

Wu, T. (2024). Active Visual Search: Investigating human strategies and how they compare to computational models. [pdf]