Full Name
Jingwan (Cynthia) Lu
Job Title
Senior Director, Head of Applied Research
Company
GenAI, Adobe
Brief Biography
Jingwan (Cynthia) Lu is a senior director from Adobe leading an applied research organization focusing on developing Adobe Firefly family of GenAI models built from the ground up. Her team started training Adobe’s first large-scale foundational model and helped rally together the rest of the company to roll out a new web-based product called Firefly featuring the image generation model as the first step in early 2023. The same technology and its extension power Adobe Photoshop’s Generative Fill and Generative Expand features giving users intelligent inpainting and outpainting experience.

Before Firefly, Jingwan was a computer vision research scientist and team lead who pioneered and led a large group effort to explore early generative models such as GANs within Adobe. Her team effort led to the rapid release of Adobe Photoshop neural filters in 2020. Neural filters, especially Adobe’s first GAN-powered Photoshop feature Smart Portrait, positioned Adobe as one of the top 10 most innovative companies in AI of 2022. Jingwan was recognized by Adobe’s Tech Excellence award in 2021.

Before Adobe, Jingwan earned her computer science PhD from Princeton University and received a Google Research Fellowship and Siebel Scholarship. She has published over 40 papers in top tier computer vision and graphics conferences. She is also a patent holder of over 50 US and international patents. As a contributor to the academic community, she served as an area chair and senior program committee member for ICCV, Siggraph, Siggraph Asia, and Eurographics.
Jingwan (Cynthia) Lu