Research and Teaching Interests:
Dr. Gao explores how human intelligence is deeply grounded in visual perception. One major theme of his research is to reverse engineer human intuitive social commonsense. By merely seeing static images or a short video, humans can spontaneously perceive a rich set of social concepts, including animacy, intentions, beliefs, desires, emotions, personality and even morality. The goals of his research include (a) revealing human perception as a type of intelligence, which understands “what” in a scene through recovering “why” and “how” a scene is generated; (b) Reverse-engineering perceptual intelligence through cognitive modeling; (c) Injecting perceptually-grounded intelligence into machines so that they can possess human-like commonsense, communicate and collaborate with humans in safe and trustworthy ways.