
The Grand Jury of AI Innovation serves as a vital pillar of the Sparknify Human vs. AI Film Festival, uniting leading generative AI specialists, technology pioneers, and machine learning researchers at the forefront of artificial intelligence. Tasked with evaluating AI-generated short films across fundamental emotional categories, this panel brings technical rigor, vision, and domain expertise to the event. Their contributions help benchmark algorithmic creative limits, analyze narrative coherence, and steward the evolving landscape of storytelling at the intersection of human emotion and generative technology.

Cristian
Carp
Shorts AI - GetShorts.app
CEO & Co-Founder
Cristian Carp is the founder of Shorts AI - GetShorts.app, an AI video creation and editing platform used by 200,000+ creators worldwide. He is an entrepreneur working across generative AI, video technology, creator tools and the creator economy, focused on making professional video production faster, simpler and more accessible through AI.

Bohyung
Han
Seoul National University
Professor
Bohyung Han is a Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Seoul National University, Korea. His research area include computer vision, and machine learning. He is one of the authors for "FIFO-Diffusion" (published in NeurIPS 2024), an innovative deep-learning algorithm for infinitely long video generation.

Long
Hoang
Martini.film
CTO
Long Hoang is the Co-Founder and CTO of Martini, an AI filmmaking platform giving filmmakers greater creative control over generative media. Previously, he was an early engineer at Supabase and has a background spanning AI, computer vision, robotics, and developer tools. His work at the intersection of technology and the arts was recognized with the Grand Prize at APE Camp 2025, a program of the Arts Council Korea (ARKO).

Shu
Hu
Purdue University
Assistant Professor
Shu Hu is an assistant professor in the School of Applied and Creative Computing and Director of the Purdue Machine Learning and Media Forensics Lab. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science and Engineering from the University at Buffalo, SUNY, in 2022. He has received a National AI Research Resource Pilot Award and an NSF CRII Award, and is a member of AAFS, IEEE, and ACM. His research covers media forensics, generative AI, and deepfake detection.

Amudhavel
Jayavel
De Montfort University
Senior Lecturer Games & Aritifical Intelligence
Dr. Amudhavel Jayavel is a Senior Lecturer in Games and AI at De Montfort University, UK. He holds a PhD from Pondicherry University, where he was a Gold Medalist. He previously conducted research at the University of Tartu, Estonia, and VIT Bhopal University, India. Dr. Jayavel’s research focuses on Generative AI, Computer Vision, and Large Language Models (LLMs). He has published over 100 papers on GANs, 3D scene understanding, and medical imaging AI.

Danica
Kragic
KTH
Professor
Danica Kragic is a Professor at the School of Computer Science and Communication at the Royal Institute of Technology, KTH. She is a researcher, a Board executive, and passionate textile crafter.

Abhinash
Kumar Giri
Google DeepMind
Software Engineer
Abhinash Giri is a Software Engineer at Google DeepMind, where he builds the production infrastructure behind Google's generative AI products. His work spans AI content authenticity, model serving systems, and responsible AI at global scale, contributing to technology powering some of Google's most widely used AI experiences. A published inventor in AI security, he brings a technical perspective on how generative AI is engineered.

Ivan
Laptev
MBZUAI
Professor
Ivan Laptev is associate dean for research and professor of computer vision at MBZUAI in Abu Dhabi, having previously directed an INRIA lab in Paris. He holds a PhD from KTH Sweden and an HdR from Ecole Normale Superieure. His interests include physically-grounded models for recognition, animation, and robotics, with 150+ published papers. He is Associate Editor in Chief of IEEE TPAMI, has chaired CVPR'18 and ICCV'23, co-founded a computer vision startup, and won the 2017 Helmholtz Prize.

Dongwon
Lee
Penn State University
Professor
Dongwon Lee is the Frymoyer Chair in Information Sciences and Technology and head of the Dept. of Privacy and Cybersecurity Informatics at Penn State's College of IST. He also advises GPTZero, and is an ACM Distinguished Scientist, Churchill College By-Fellow, and Fulbright Cyber Security Scholar. Formerly at AT&T Bell Labs and a Program Director at NSF, he holds a Ph.D. from UCLA and researches the intersection of data science, machine learning, and cybersecurity.

Kyeonghun
Lee
Seoul national Univ
Researcher
I was recommended for this jury by Professor Jaesik Park of Seoul National University. My research at Seoul National University focuses on computer vision, with additional interests in human-computer interaction (HCI) and understanding human responses to emerging technologies.

Jiebo
Luo
University of Rochester
Hopeman Professor of Engineering
Dr. Jiebo Luo is the Hopeman Professor of Engineering and Professor of Computer Science at the University of Rochester, advancing computer vision, machine learning, NLP, and digital health. Previously a Kodak Distinguished Inventor with 98 U.S. patents, he has authored 700+ papers, including MagicTime, a text-to-video diffusion model. Former Editor-in-Chief of IEEE Trans. on Multimedia, he is a Fellow of ACM, IEEE, AAAI, NAI, AIMBE, IAPR, and SPIE, and won the 2025 IEEE McCluskey Award.

Nasir
Memon
New York University
Professor
Nasir Memon is a professor of computer science at NYU Tandon School of Engineering, known for seminal work on protecting and detecting synthetic media. He served as editor-in-chief of IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security, the premier journal in media authentication and forensics, and as president of the IEEE Biometrics Council. He is a Fellow of the IEEE, SPIE, and IAPR, and was an IEEE Signal Processing Society Distinguished Lecturer.

Kartikesh
Mishra
Lamina Labs
Cofounder and CTO
Kartikesh Mishra is Co-founder and CTO of Lamina Labs, a YC-backed startup building AI video infrastructure. He holds degrees in Computer Science and Mathematics from MIT, where his research spanned computer vision, reinforcement learning, robotics, and multimodal AI. His current work focuses on generative video, multimodal AI, and AI systems for visual media.

Bora
Mutluoglu
Reacher
President and Co-founder
I am the Co-Founder of Reacher, a platform helping brands grow and scale their presence on TikTok Shop. I work closely with brands, agencies, and strategic partners across the social commerce ecosystem, with a particular focus on partnerships, business development, customer growth, and helping companies build stronger TikTok Shop affiliate programs. I like being outdoors especially hikes.

Vineeth
N Balasubramanian
Indian Institute of Technology, Hyderabad & Microsoft Research
Professor & Principal Researcher
Vineeth N Balasubramanian is a Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research India and a Professor (on leave) at IIT Hyderabad, where he founded the Dept. of Artificial Intelligence (2019-22). His research covers deep learning, explainability, and multimodal foundation models. A Fellow of INAE and INSA Associate Fellow, he has received India's National Teachers Award, a Google Research Scholar Award, and a Fulbright-Nehru Fellowship, publishing at ICML, CVPR, NeurIPS, and ICLR.

Siena
Oberman
Artemis
Founder / Producer
Siena Oberman is the founder of Artemis, a production finance company supporting visionary, audience-driven filmmakers. She has produced or financed more than 25 features, including Company, Dead Man’s Wire, Fairyland, The Good Mother, and Mainstream, and executive produced Sunny and Skin. Her films have screened at Sundance, Tribeca, Telluride, Venice, and Berlinale and secured distribution from Amazon, A24, Lionsgate, and Universal. A Creative Coalition NextGen Leader, she has been named one of Variety’s Producers to Watch and Forbes’ 30 Under 30. She serves on the United Nations Council for Global Change board and attended USC.

Tomas
Pajdla
Czech Technical University in Prague
Professor
Tomas Pajdla is a professor at the Czech Technical University in Prague, working on the geometry and algebra of computer vision and robotics, with emphasis on minimal problems, 3D reconstruction, and industrial vision. He contributed to epipolar geometry for panoramic cameras, non-central camera models, and solvers for structure-from-motion. His coauthored work won awards at OAGM, BMVC, ACCV, ICCV, and CVPR.

Jerry
Qian
Reacher
President and Co-founder
I am the Co-Founder of Reacher, where I help lead the company’s growth and development within the rapidly evolving TikTok Shop and social commerce ecosystem. I work across key areas of the business, including customer and partner relationships, strategic initiatives, and the continued development of Reacher’s offering for brands and agencies looking to scale their affiliate programs.

Petia
Radeva
Universitat de Barcelona
Professor
Prof. Petia Radeva is a Full Professor at the Universitat de Barcelona and Head of the AIBA research group, focused on deep learning, computer vision, and health applications like food recognition. She was PI on 12+ international and 45+ national projects, is Editor in Chief of Pattern Recognition, and was Research Manager of Spain's AEI (2019-2024). She received the 2024 Narcis Monturiol medal and is an IAPR Fellow, having supervised 27 PhD students and published 130+ papers.

Divya
Saxena
IIT Jodhpur
Professor
Dr. Divya Saxena studies how generative and multimodal AI systems learn, adapt, and create under real-world constraints. She is an Assistant Professor at IIT Jodhpur, where she leads the Machine Intelligence Lab. Her research spans generative AI, foundation models, multimodal AI, and efficient AI systems, with publications at CVPR, AAAI, NeurIPS, IEEE TPAMI, and TNNLS, exploring data-efficient generative models and image/video generation.

Surabhi
Sinha
Adobe
Machine learning Engineer
Surabhi Sinha is a Machine Learning Engineer 4 at Adobe with 7+ years in generative AI, working on Adobe's Firefly platform to optimize model performance, reduce costs, and enable on-device deployment across Photoshop, Illustrator, and Adobe Express. Her research experience includes generative AI for MRI-based Alzheimer's classification, funded by NIH. She was named a Top Influential Leader by World Data Congress and has judged numerous hackathons and peer-reviewed AI conferences.

Tomoki
Toda
Nagoya University
Professor
Dr. Tomoki Toda is a Professor at the Global Research Institute for Mobility in Society, Institutes of Innovation for Future Society, Nagoya University, Japan. His research interests include sound media information processing, encompassing speech information processing (e.g., speech generation, speech recognition, and speech assessment), music information processing (e.g., music analysis, music source separation, and music generation), and acoustic environment information processing (e.g., sound event recognition, anomalous sound detection, and audio captioning).

Jamie
Tsai
Reacher
Finance Lead
I am the Finance Lead at Reacher and I also support the company’s internal operations and administrative processes. I am involved in areas such as payments, internal access, and operational coordination. I own a dog and love the outdoors.

Chia-Lun
Wu
Hera Video
Co-founder & CTO
Building hera.video - AI motion designer.