Talk Abstract: Firefly is Adobe’s family of large-scale GenAI foundational models. This talk will go through the brief development journey of Firefly image generation foundational model and touch on the new developments that will be released at Adobe Max conference in October. I will touch on our short-term solution and long-term plan to develop AI responsibly and inclusively to combat harm & bias. I will also share some of the latest research inventions coming out of our research organization and talk about Adobe’s strategy to address content provenance in the age of GenAI content proliferation.

Speaker 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 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.