{
  "schema_version": "2.0",
  "updated": "2026-08-24",
  "person": {
    "name": "Ghazanfar Ali",
    "suffix": "Ph.D.",
    "role": "Assistant Professor, Department of AI",
    "affiliation": "Gachon University",
    "location": "Seoul, Republic of Korea",
    "email": "ghazanfar.6785@gmail.com",
    "orcid": "0000-0002-7741-1938",
    "research_summary": "Multimodal intelligent agents, human motion and co-speech gesture, grounded LLM/RAG systems, computer vision, real-time AI infrastructure, and human-centered evaluation."
  },
  "education": [
    {"institution": "KIST School, University of Science and Technology", "credential": "Ph.D. in AI-Robotics", "start": "2017-09", "end": "2023-08", "country": "Republic of Korea"},
    {"institution": "National University of Sciences and Technology", "credential": "B.E. in Computer Engineering", "start": "2009-09", "end": "2014-01", "country": "Pakistan"},
    {"institution": "Military College Jhelum", "credential": "College, Pre-Engineering", "start": "2002", "end": "2007", "country": "Pakistan"},
    {"institution": "Army Public School & College, Kharian Cantt", "credential": "School Education", "start": "1994", "end": "2002", "country": "Pakistan"}
  ],
  "employment": [
    {"organization": "Gachon University", "role": "Assistant Professor, Department of AI", "start": "2026-03", "end": "present", "country": "Republic of Korea"},
    {"organization": "KAIST LLM Center", "role": "InnoCORE Postdoctoral Researcher", "start": "2025-09", "end": "2026-02", "country": "Republic of Korea"},
    {"organization": "Korea Institute of Science and Technology", "role": "Postdoctoral Researcher", "start": "2023-09", "end": "2025-08", "country": "Republic of Korea"},
    {"organization": "Korea Institute of Science and Technology", "role": "Research Assistant", "start": "2017-09", "end": "2023-08", "country": "Republic of Korea"},
    {"organization": "Penumbra Digital", "role": "Web Development Advisor and Team Lead", "start": "2015-06", "end": "present", "work_mode": "remote"},
    {"organization": "University of Central Punjab", "role": "Lab Engineer", "start": "2014-02", "end": "2017-08", "country": "Pakistan"},
    {"organization": "Xetecx Solutions", "role": "Co-Founder and CTO", "start": "2013-06", "end": "2015-05", "country": "Pakistan"}
  ],
  "profile_metrics": {
    "scholarly_outputs": 17,
    "national_rnd_projects_participated": 8,
    "live_research_demos": 10,
    "motion_hours_audited_in_omnimo": "600+"
  },
  "status_policy": "Working systems, active research, manuscripts, studies, specifications, and proposals are labeled separately. Under-review results are not presented as published results.",
  "active_work": [
    {"name": "Buraq", "status": "working system", "summary": "Provider-driven live multimodal-agent runtime serving desktop, Unity, and browser clients through documented contracts."},
    {"name": "OmniMo", "status": "working platform", "summary": "Multi-format motion-data infrastructure producing a Shared Joint Space with provenance, readers, builders, quality gates, and dataset playbooks.", "evidence": ["6+ corpora", "600+ hours audited", "continuously expanding"]},
    {"name": "MotionBridge", "status": "active research program; design and evidence stage", "summary": "Consumer-accessible monocular video to clean, complete, retargetable 4D human motion using a frozen motion-token vocabulary."},
    {"name": "MotionStage", "status": "specification", "summary": "Skeletal motion to rendered video plus exact 2D, 3D, camera, occlusion, and segmentation ground truth."},
    {"name": "What Does a Motion-Hour Cost?", "status": "evidence base in progress; manuscript not yet complete", "summary": "Review of video-to-motion ingestion, motion tokenization, and the unreported economics of motion corpora.", "evidence": ["375+ verified unique works", "343+ structured paper notes", "continuously expanding"]},
    {"name": "Motion EvalSuite and GQNet", "status": "benchmark in development", "summary": "Evaluation program spanning perceptual, semantic, kinematic, reference, diversity, artifact, latency, and resource criteria.", "evidence": ["7 broad evaluation axes", "approximately 35 metrics planned", "6 of 7 resource baselines measured"]},
    {"name": "ConGRets", "status": "manuscript under review", "summary": "Contrastive retrieval of curated co-speech gesture units with zero-shot motion-derived speaker style and text-only inference.", "reported_under_review_results": ["1,000 CPU queries in under 500 ms", "memory footprint below 100 MB", "99% speaker-style classification", "89% content-to-cluster accuracy"]},
    {"name": "ControllableGesture", "status": "design specification; implementation and study milestones pending", "summary": "Text-conditioned gesture with nine authored semantic and prosodic control signals."},
    {"name": "Behavioral Imposter Test", "status": "proposal and study specification v0.4; no participants collected", "summary": "Signal-detection and survival-analysis instrument for identity-behavior incongruence in embodied personas."},
    {"name": "Phase-Aligned Gesture Tokenizer", "status": "planned; gated by phase-segmentation reliability", "summary": "Matched comparison of variable-rate phase-aligned tokens against fixed-rate and learned alternatives."},
    {"name": "Multi-Task Transfer for Gesture Semantics", "status": "planned; depends on tokenizer project", "summary": "Matched-compute study isolating whether action-language auxiliary tasks improve co-speech gesture semantics."},
    {"name": "Prosody-Lite Conditioning", "status": "planned; corpus phase can start", "summary": "Middle-Out prediction of duration and prosodic features from text, evaluated as a perceptual-value versus latency curve."},
    {"name": "Semantic Motion Matching", "status": "research direction", "summary": "Frame-level on-manifold retrieval steered by motion state, semantics, and persona, connected to skeleton-invariant motion matching."}
  ],
  "scholarly_outputs": [
    {"year": 2026, "type": "journal article", "title": "Lightweight Speech-Conditioned Upper-Face Animation for Virtual Agents via Emotion-Liveness Composition", "venue": "IEEE Access", "pdf": "assets/papers/upper-face-animation.pdf"},
    {"year": 2026, "type": "conference paper", "title": "Through Van Gogh's Eyes: Global Style Transfer with Diffusion Model", "venue": "ECCV", "pdf": "assets/papers/global-style-transfer.pdf"},
    {"year": 2025, "type": "journal article", "title": "Expanding Multilingual Co-Speech Interaction: The Impact of Enhanced Gesture Units in Text-to-Gesture Synthesis for Digital Humans", "venue": "IEEE Access", "role": "first author", "pdf": "assets/papers/multilingual-gesture.pdf"},
    {"year": 2025, "type": "journal article", "title": "RIDGE: Rule-Infused Deep Learning for Realistic Co-Speech Gesture Generation", "venue": "Computer Animation and Virtual Worlds", "role": "first author", "pdf": "assets/papers/ridge.pdf"},
    {"year": 2025, "type": "journal article", "title": "A Retrieval-Augmented Generation System for Accurate and Contextual Historical Analysis: AI-Agent for the Annals of the Joseon Dynasty", "venue": "Computer Animation and Virtual Worlds", "pdf": "assets/papers/joseon-rag-journal.pdf"},
    {"year": 2025, "type": "journal article", "title": "ASAP for Multi-Outputs: Auto-generating Storyboard and Pre-visualization with Virtual Actors Based on Screenplay", "venue": "Multimedia Tools and Applications", "role": "equal contribution", "pdf": "assets/papers/asap-journal.pdf"},
    {"year": 2025, "type": "adjunct paper", "title": "RAG-based AI-Agent for Contextualized Analysis of High-Density Historical Records: Application to the Annals of the Joseon Dynasty", "venue": "IEEE ISMAR-Adjunct", "pdf": "assets/papers/joseon-rag-ismar.pdf"},
    {"year": 2025, "type": "adjunct paper", "title": "LUFA: Lightweight Upper-Face Animation for VR/MR Avatars", "venue": "IEEE ISMAR-Adjunct"},
    {"year": 2024, "type": "journal article", "title": "Enhancing Doctor-Patient Communication in Surgical Explanations: Designing Effective Facial Expressions and Gestures for Animated Physician Characters", "venue": "Computer Animation and Virtual Worlds", "award": "Best Paper Award, CASA 2024", "pdf": "assets/papers/virtual-physician.pdf"},
    {"year": 2022, "type": "poster", "title": "Improving Co-Speech Gesture Rule-Map Generation via Wild Pose Matching with Gesture Units", "venue": "SIGGRAPH Asia Posters", "role": "first author", "pdf": "assets/papers/wild-pose-matching.pdf"},
    {"year": 2022, "type": "live demonstration", "title": "ASAP: Auto-generating Storyboard and Previz", "venue": "SIGGRAPH Asia Real-Time Live!"},
    {"year": 2022, "type": "poster", "title": "No-Code Digital Human for Conversational Behavior", "venue": "SIGGRAPH Asia Posters", "pdf": "assets/papers/flow-human.pdf"},
    {"year": 2021, "type": "journal article", "title": "Silhouettes from Real Objects Enable Realistic Interactions with a Virtual Human in Mobile Augmented Reality", "venue": "Applied Sciences", "pdf": "assets/papers/silhouette-mobile-ar.pdf"},
    {"year": 2021, "type": "adjunct paper", "title": "ASAP: Auto-generating Storyboard and Previz with Virtual Humans", "venue": "IEEE ISMAR-Adjunct"},
    {"year": 2021, "type": "workshop paper", "title": "Auto-generating Virtual Human Behavior by Understanding User Contexts", "venue": "IEEE VR Abstracts and Workshops", "pdf": "assets/papers/context-aware-behavior.pdf"},
    {"year": 2020, "type": "journal article", "title": "Automatic Text-to-Gesture Rule Generation for Embodied Conversational Agents", "venue": "Computer Animation and Virtual Worlds", "role": "first author", "pdf": "assets/papers/automatic-text-to-gesture.pdf"},
    {"year": 2019, "type": "conference paper", "title": "Design of Seamless Multi-modal Interaction Framework for Intelligent Virtual Agents in Wearable Mixed Reality Environment", "venue": "CASA", "role": "first author", "pdf": "assets/papers/wearable-mr-agent.pdf"}
  ]
}