Professor Qian Liu was appointed Dean of the Academy of Film and Creative Technology (AFCT) at Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University in June 2024. He previously served as founding Dean of the Digital Media School of Beijing Film Academy and has held a range of academic research positions in national centres and research institutes both in the US and China. Professor Liu worked as a visualisation integration researcher at the California Institute for Telecommunication and Information Technology, University of California San Diego, and as a system researcher at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), US, and China Electric Power Research Institute (CEPRI).
Professor Liu holds a master’s degree in statistics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and a bachelor’s degree in computer science from Xi’an Jiaotong University. He was a visiting researcher in the Artificial Intelligence Lab of Sapienza Università di Roma, Italy. In his early years, he studied Western painting under the guidance of Liang Cai, known for oil painting, while Liang was a professor at China Academy of Art.
Professor Liu’s research and creative interests focus on digital media arts and technology, digital filmmaking, cultural and creative technologies, immersive display systems and environments, distributed image and video database systems, interactive design, VR/AR/XR, interactive entertainment, program-generated art, and generative AI applications. He is a digital media artist and his digital artworks are exhibited at international and domestic art festivals and in private collections.
His applications of creativity and research in his interdisciplinary fields have achieved significant results. He served as Executive Chairman of the Digital Imaging Creative Committee of the China Video Industry Association (CVIA) and Deputy Director of the 5G Professional Committee of China Communications Industry Association. Currently, he serves as a member of the film gold digital Honor Recommendation Committee, a member of the Recommendation Committee of the AI Imaging/Video Talent Selection Programme, and Chairman of the International Creative Art Contest (ICAC) in the 2024 Busan International Art Festival (BIAF).