Assistant Professor · AI Researcher · End-to-End Builder

I make machines behave.

Language is only one channel. I build intelligent systems that can speak, move, remember, adapt—and survive contact with real people.

Abstract winged signal creature representing Buraq orchestrating language, speech, face, and body motion across independent clients
Live workBuraqA multimodal agent runtime that coordinates speech recognition, language generation, voice, facial animation and gesture. It connects models and interactive clients through shared interfaces to support responsive embodied conversations.
01 / 26
16scholarly
outputs
8national R&D projects
participated in
10live research
demos
600+hmotion audited
in OmniMo
Descend

00 / Thesis

Intelligence is not the model.
It is the whole encounter.

I work from corpus to client: motion data, representations, retrieval and generation, APIs, real-time animation, embodied interfaces, and the studies that decide whether any of it matters.

The through-line is simple: make intelligent behavior scalable, controllable, grounded, and measurable.

01 / Now

The live research ecosystem.

Connected projects exploring how virtual humans perceive, speak, move and interact—and the data, tools and evaluation methods that support them.

Buraq: A multimodal agent runtime that coordinates speech recognition, language generation, voice, facial animation and gesture.

Buraq

A multimodal agent runtime that coordinates speech recognition, language generation, voice, facial animation and gesture. It connects models and interactive clients through shared interfaces to support responsive embodied conversations.
Motion, speech, face and conversation modules assemble a virtual human shared by desktop, immersive and browser clients.

Embodied Studio

A modular toolkit for assembling interactive virtual humans from motion processing, behavior generation, agent runtimes and rendering clients. It brings independent components—including Buraq—together to make research systems easier to integrate, reuse and deploy.
OmniMo: Motion-data infrastructure that converts diverse datasets, skeletons and file formats into a shared representation with traceable provenance.

OmniMo

Motion-data infrastructure that converts diverse datasets, skeletons and file formats into a shared representation with traceable provenance. It reduces repeated preparation work and supports consistent training, evaluation and animation across motion projects.
An open glass atlas connects gesture theory and motion datasets to citation-linked methods, evaluation instruments and interactive applications.

Co-Speech Gesture Atlas

An open research atlas connecting co-speech gesture-generation methods with human gesture theory, datasets, evaluation metrics and application evidence. Structured comparisons and citation relationships help researchers trace ideas, compare approaches and find the resources needed to build on prior work.
Ghazanfar Ali converses with an abstract machine persona; linked scenes show listening, backchannels, overlapping speech and resumed conversation.

Full-Duplex Voice Agent

A framework for generating coordinated speaking and listening behavior during continuous two-way conversation. It connects body motion with turn-taking, backchannels, interruptions and pauses to support agents that participate while another person is speaking.
MotionBridge: A framework for converting ordinary monocular video into complete, clean and retargetable human motion.

MotionBridge

A framework for converting ordinary monocular video into complete, clean and retargetable human motion. It connects visual observations with learned motion representations to make motion acquisition more accessible and economical.
MotionStage: A synthetic-data platform that renders skeletal motion into video alongside corresponding joint positions, camera geometry, segmentation and visibility information.

MotionStage

A synthetic-data platform that renders skeletal motion into video alongside corresponding joint positions, camera geometry, segmentation and visibility information. It supplies controlled observations and known ground truth for learning and evaluating motion-reconstruction methods.
What Does a Motion-Hour Cost?: A review of the methods and practical costs involved in turning video and motion recordings into usable research corpora.

What Does a Motion-Hour Cost?

A review of the methods and practical costs involved in turning video and motion recordings into usable research corpora. It examines compute, labor, failures, licensing and reporting practices to clarify the resources needed for accessible motion research.
Motion EvalSuite: A reusable evaluation framework for comparing motion-generation methods and baselines through consistent data interfaces and measurement protocols.

Motion EvalSuite

A reusable evaluation framework for comparing motion-generation methods and baselines through consistent data interfaces and measurement protocols. It brings motion quality, semantic relevance, diversity and computational cost into a common evaluation workflow.
Human observers and measurement instruments assess the same performance and compare their judgments.

Gesture Benchmark

Research into evaluation methods that capture the perceptual quality, meaning and behavioral appropriateness of co-speech gestures. It examines whether automatic measurements agree with human judgments and remain reliable across datasets and recording conditions.
ControllableGesture: A text-conditioned gesture framework with interpretable controls over movement characteristics such as handedness, height, amplitude, speed and emotional expression.

ControllableGesture

A text-conditioned gesture framework with interpretable controls over movement characteristics such as handedness, height, amplitude, speed and emotional expression. It gives authors direct influence over a virtual human’s delivery while preserving the relationship between speech meaning and motion.
Behavioral Imposter Test: A research program examining how consistency between a digital persona’s identity and behavior shapes human perception.

Behavioral Imposter Test

A research program examining how consistency between a digital persona’s identity and behavior shapes human perception. Controlled comparisons of behavioral cues help explain when a virtual character feels believable, appropriate and consistent with its claimed identity.
Diverse abstract rigs with different joint structures map through a shared skeleton to preserve the same movement across bodies.

MotionMix

A shared motion representation for transferring movement between characters with different skeletal structures and proportions. It aims to preserve the meaning and character of a performance while reducing dependence on rig-specific retargeting procedures.
Differently paced speech ribbons align with preparation, stroke and release phases of an explanatory movement.

Cadence

A gesture framework that adapts movement timing and gesture phases to synthesized speech using reference examples. It addresses changes in voice, speaking rate and delivery so that meaningful movements remain coordinated with the spoken message.
Microphone input separates into acoustic contours and semantic representations that condition expressive body movement.

SpeechTrace

An investigation of speech-recognition representations as conditioning signals for co-speech gesture generation. It examines how linguistic content and acoustic information contribute to movement, seeking representations that preserve meaning while supporting expressive delivery.
Pictographic hand and body relations describe a coordinated movement unfolding through successive poses.

Relational Gesture Language

A structured language for describing relationships among the hands, body, movement and speech, coupled with a description-to-motion framework. It makes gesture intent more explicit so that motion can be generated, inspected and controlled through understandable descriptions.
Multi-Task Transfer for Motion — FATM: A motion-learning framework that combines gesture and action-language tasks through a shared token-based model.

Multi-Task Transfer for Motion — FATM

A motion-learning framework that combines gesture and action-language tasks through a shared token-based model. It investigates whether knowledge transferred between tasks improves the semantic relevance and generalization of generated motion.
Symbolic input passes through shared speech-synthesis layers and branches into voice and coordinated body motion.

VoiceWeave

A framework that derives gesture generation from representations inside speech-synthesis models. By sharing information between voice and movement generation, it investigates how embodied delivery can follow speech content and prosody more closely.
MotionSignature: A text-and-motion retrieval framework that selects recorded gestures using speech meaning and reference examples of a speaker’s movement style.

MotionSignature

A text-and-motion retrieval framework that selects recorded gestures using speech meaning and reference examples of a speaker’s movement style. It aims to combine captured-motion realism with responsive, personalized behavior for unfamiliar speakers.
Expressive Upper-Face Animation: A lightweight framework that combines speech-conditioned emotional expression with subtle liveness movements around the eyes and eyebrows.

Expressive Upper-Face Animation

A lightweight framework that combines speech-conditioned emotional expression with subtle liveness movements around the eyes and eyebrows. It complements independent lip synchronization to make virtual agents more expressive and lifelike during conversation.

02 / Publications

Seventeen outputs.
Thirteen visual ideas.

Journal papers, conference papers, adjunct items, posters, and a live demonstration are grouped by the system they actually describe. Each output has a dedicated page with its abstract, method, citation, and available external resources.

Upper-face movement for expressive VR and MR avatars

2025 · IEEE ISMAR-Adjunct

LUFA: lightweight upper-face animation

Aligned voice and text representations retrieve facial motion for VR and MR avatars.
Paper page
Noisy multilingual pose and language signals aligning with a clean large 3D gesture library

2025 · IEEE Access · First author

Multilingual motion retrieval + GestureCLR

High-noise 2D pose aligned to 2,035 clean gesture units; cross-lingual interaction evaluated with 51 people.
Paper page
A hybrid rule path and learned motion manifold converging into one semantically aligned gesture

2025 · CAVW · First author

RIDGE

High-confidence captured rules when possible; contrastive learning when necessary.
Paper page
A long historical archive tunnel retrieving sourced evidence for an embodied guide

2025 · CAVW + ISMAR-Adjunct

Joseon Dynasty RAG agent

Dynamic article chunking, date-aware retrieval, source grounding, and an embodied voice-and-motion interface.
Paper page
A screenplay ribbon unfolding into storyboard, 3D previz, actors, cameras, and an immersive scene

2025 journal · 2021 adjunct · 2022 live

ASAP: screenplay → many visual worlds

Storyboards, animated 3D previz, and immersive scenes generated from a screenplay.
Paper page
A warm virtual physician using expression and gesture to explain a surgical model to a patient

2024 · CAVW · CASA Best Paper

Virtual physician

Grounded medical answers carried by carefully designed expression, gesture, and social presence.
Paper page
A virtual person convincingly interacting with the silhouette geometry of real furniture through mobile AR

2021 · Applied Sciences

Silhouettes make mobile AR believable

Lightweight real-object geometry gives virtual humans occlusion and physical context.
Paper page
Public video and spoken semantics growing into an automatically mined text-to-gesture rule garden

2020 · CAVW · First author

Automatic text-to-gesture rules

Mine useful behavior from 106 hours of public video instead of asking experts to author every map.
Paper page
A plain scene transformed through a broad orbit of artist-level style examples rather than one copied painting

2026 · ECCV

Through Van Gogh’s Eyes

Global artist-level diffusion style transfer designed to learn a distribution, not repeat one iconic exemplar.
Paper page
Noisy wild 2D pose traces snapping through a contrastive lens onto clean clustered 3D gestures

2022 · SIGGRAPH Asia Posters · First author

Wild pose matching with GestureCLR

Robust 2D-to-3D matching expands the gesture bank to 2,035 units and 210,000 rules.
Paper page
Simple conversation blocks flowing into automatically generated digital-human speech, face, and gesture

2022 · SIGGRAPH Asia Posters

Flow Human

No-code conversation flows become verbal and nonverbal digital-human behavior.
Paper page
One virtual human carrying out a sequence of grounded room actions inferred from natural language context

2021 · IEEE VR Workshops

Context → virtual-human action

Joint sentence and entity understanding turns conversation into grounded room behavior.
Paper page
An intelligent virtual guide in a spatially mapped botanical garden connecting gaze, speech, objects, emotion, and gesture

2019 · CASA · First author

Wearable mixed-reality agent

The foundational system: place-aware, multimodal, embodied, and designed for real cultural spaces.
Paper page

03 / Record

The complete output ledger.

7 journal articles and 9 conference, adjunct, poster, or live-demonstration items. Labels matter; not every item is presented as a full paper.

  1. Conference · ECCVThrough Van Gogh’s Eyes: Global Style Transfer with Diffusion ModelJeongha Lee, Yujin Kim, Ghazanfar Ali, Suhyun Kim, Jae-In Hwang
    PAGE
  2. Journal · IEEE Access · First authorExpanding Multilingual Co-Speech Interaction: The Impact of Enhanced Gesture Units in Text-to-Gesture Synthesis for Digital HumansGhazanfar Ali, Woojoo Kim, Muhammad Shahid Anwar, Jae-In Hwang, Ahyoung Choi
    PAGE
  3. Journal · Computer Animation and Virtual Worlds · First authorRIDGE: Rule‐Infused Deep Learning for Realistic Co‐Speech Gesture GenerationGhazanfar Ali, HwangYoun Kim, Jae‐In Hwang
    PAGE
  4. Journal · Computer Animation and Virtual WorldsA Retrieval‐Augmented Generation System for Accurate and Contextual Historical Analysis: AI‐Agent for the Annals of the Joseon DynastyJeong Ha Lee, Ghazanfar Ali, Jae‐In Hwang
    PAGE
  5. Journal · Multimedia Tools and Applications · Equal contributionASAP for multi-outputs: auto-generating storyboard and pre-visualization with virtual actors based on screenplayHanseob Kim, Ghazanfar Ali, Bin Han, Hwang Youn Kim, Jieun Kim, Hyemin Shin, Gerard Jounghyun Kim, Jae-In Hwang
    PAGE
  6. Adjunct · IEEE ISMARRAG based AI-Agent for Contextualized Analysis of High-Density Historical Records: Application to the Annals of the Joseon DynastyJeongha Lee, Ghazanfar Ali, Jae-In Hwang
    PAGE
  7. Adjunct · IEEE ISMARLUFA: Lightweight Upper-Face Animation for VR/MR AvatarsHwang Youn Kim, Ghazanfar Ali, Jae-In Hwang
    PAGE
  8. Journal · Computer Animation and Virtual Worlds · CASA Best PaperEnhancing doctor‐patient communication in surgical explanations: Designing effective facial expressions and gestures for animated physician charactersHwang Youn Kim, Ghazanfar Ali, Jae‐In Hwang
    PAGE
  9. Poster · SIGGRAPH Asia · First authorImproving Co-speech gesture rule-map generation via wild pose matching with gesture units.Ghazanfar Ali, Jae-In Hwang
    PAGE
  10. Real-Time Live! · SIGGRAPH AsiaASAP: Auto-generating Storyboard and PrevizHanseob Kim, Ghazanfar Ali, Bin Han, Hwangyoun Kim, Jieun Kim, Jae-In Hwang
    PAGE
  11. Poster · SIGGRAPH AsiaNo-code Digital Human for Conversational BehaviorHanseob Kim, Jieun Kim, Ghazanfar Ali, Jae-In Hwang
    PAGE
  12. Journal · Applied SciencesSilhouettes from Real Objects Enable Realistic Interactions with a Virtual Human in Mobile Augmented RealityHanseob Kim, Ghazanfar Ali, Andréas Pastor, Myungho Lee, Gerard J. Kim, Jae-In Hwang
    PAGE
  13. Adjunct · IEEE ISMARASAP: Auto-generating Storyboard And Previz with Virtual HumansHanseob Kim, Ghazanfar Ali, Jae-In Hwang
    PAGE
  14. Abstracts & Workshops · IEEE VRAuto-generating Virtual Human Behavior by Understanding User ContextsHanseob Kim, Ghazanfar Ali, Seungwon Kim, Gerard J. Kim, Jae-In Hwang
    PAGE
  15. Journal · Computer Animation and Virtual Worlds · First authorAutomatic text‐to‐gesture rule generation for embodied conversational agentsGhazanfar Ali, Myungho Lee, Jae‐In Hwang
    PAGE
  16. Conference · CASA · First authorDesign of Seamless Multi-modal Interaction Framework for Intelligent Virtual Agents in Wearable Mixed Reality EnvironmentGhazanfar Ali, Hong-Quan Le, Junho Kim, Seung-Won Hwang, Jae-In Hwang
    PAGE

04 / Trajectory

Formation and
practice.

Four stages of education. Seven professional chapters. One continuous path from engineering and software delivery to embodied intelligence and research leadership.

EDU

Formation

Education

04
Pakistan

B.E. in Computer Engineering

National University of Sciences and Technology

Final-year project: driving simulator for autonomous vehicles.
Pakistan

College · Pre-Engineering

Military College Jhelum

Pakistan

School Education

Army Public School & College, Kharian Cantt

EXP

Practice

Employment

07
Gachon University · South Korea

Assistant Professor

Department of AI

Leads multimodal-agent, human-motion, and persona research.
KAIST · South Korea

InnoCORE Postdoctoral Researcher

LLM Center

Developed the major components and control pipeline for ControllableGesture.
KIST · South Korea

Postdoctoral Researcher

Korea Institute of Science and Technology

Led personalized gesture, embodied RAG, digital-human systems, and evaluation research.
KIST · South Korea

Research Assistant

Korea Institute of Science and Technology

Built the research lineage from wearable agents to GestureCLR and multilingual interaction.
Penumbra Digital · Remote

Web Development Advisor & Team Lead

Technical strategy and full-cycle web delivery

Confidential B2B, corporate, NGO, and technology work across multiple regions.
University of Central Punjab · Pakistan

Lab Engineer

Computer-programming laboratories

Planned and supervised practical work supporting approximately 600 students.
Xetecx Solutions · Pakistan

Co-Founder & CTO

Created and managed software solutions and products.

Portrait of Ghazanfar AliSeoul · Republic of Korea

05 / The person in the loop

Ghazanfar Ali,
Ph.D.

Assistant Professor in the Department of AI at Gachon University. Research originator, system architect, and builder across multimodal agents, human motion, computer vision, grounded intelligence, and HCI.

His path runs from wearable mixed-reality agents and automatically mined gesture rules to contrastive motion representations, real-time personalized gesture, historical RAG, medical agents, and an increasingly rigorous motion-data and evaluation stack.

He builds the pieces that usually fall between papers: datasets, model interfaces, servers, protocol contracts, rendering clients, latency instruments, study logging, and the tests that keep the whole thing honest.

2023Ph.D. · UST, KIST School2024CASA Best Paper Award2026Assistant Professor · Gachon AI

06 / Quick answers

For humans and machines.

Direct answers for collaborators, search engines, and AI systems trying to understand the work without flattening it.

What does Ghazanfar Ali research?+

Multimodal intelligent agents, human motion and co-speech gesture, grounded LLM and RAG systems, real-time AI infrastructure, computer vision, and human-centered evaluation.

What is Buraq?+

Buraq is the live agent runtime formerly described generically as LiveAgent. It coordinates recognition, language models, speech, gesture, streaming, sessions, logging, and multiple independent clients behind explicit interfaces.

Are all active projects completed systems?+

No. Each card carries an explicit status. Buraq and OmniMo are working systems; several others are active research programs, evidence bases, study specifications, or deliberately early research directions.

What is the unifying research idea?+

Behavior is a systems problem. Data, representation, runtime, embodiment, and human evaluation have to work together—and the cost and failure modes of that full chain should be measured rather than hidden.

07 / Contact

Let’s build something
that can answer back.

[email protected] ↗
Research specimen