Zoya’s work lies at the interface of human perception & cognition, computer vision & machine learning, and human computer interfaces. Zoya actively works on understanding and modeling human attention and memory, as well as on artificial intelligence for creativity. She is excited by the concept of “visual symbolism”: how humans successfully communicate complex and often abstract topics through visual means, in designing information visualizations, infographics, iconography, and graphic designs. Zoya’s approach to research is to run perception studies on humans, and use the collected insights to build smarter computational algorithms. Zoya’s work is interdisciplinary and is published in top-tier human vision, computer vision, HCI, and visualization venues.

Zoya received her PhD from MIT in 2018 at the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab. Her thesis was on “Computational Perception for Multimodal Document Understanding” and was awarded the George M. Sprowls Award for Best PhD Theses in Computer Science. Zoya’s M.Sc. thesis, also from MIT, was on “Computational Understanding of Image Memorability“. Prior to this, Zoya attended the University of Toronto, where she majored in computer science and statistics and was an undergraduate research assistant in computer vision.

More about Zoya’s research: http://zoyathinks.com/

A complete list of publications is on Google Scholar. The below list only includes papers published since joining Adobe in 2018.