CCDS’s Prof Loy Chen Change Receives Prestigious IIT Bombay International Award

Prof Loy Chen Change, President’s Chair Professor in Computer Science at CCDS, has been named one of two joint recipients of the 2025 IIT Bombay International Award for Outstanding Research in Engineering and Technology. The award celebrates his pioneering research in computer vision, advancing visual content restoration, enhancement, and generative content creation. 

The IIT Bombay International Award is among the most prestigious honours in South-East Asia. The 2025 ceremony held on 15 September at the IIT Bombay campus, featured Prof Loy presenting his research and engaged with faculty, students, and the award jury. 

Prof Loy’s career in computer vision has been defined by milestone breakthroughs. His early work on SRCNN (2014) catalysed the modern era of deep learning-based image super-resolution. He subsequently developed ESRGAN for perceptual quality, BasicVSR/BasicVSR++ for efficient video restoration, and CodeFormer for blind face restoration. These advances moved image and video restoration from controlled laboratory settings to robust, real-world applications. CodeFormer alone has reached more than 67 million users worldwide through platforms for AI art generation and character creation. 

Beyond super-resolution, Prof Loy has delivered innovations such as Zero-DCE++, a widely adopted method for low-light image enhancement. He introduced the WIDER Face dataset, now the global benchmark for face detection, and CLIP-IQA, a new standard for image quality assessment built on vision-language models. His research has been adopted by leading companies including NVIDIA, Adobe, and Samsung, and has been applied in areas ranging from biomedical imaging and MRI to microscopy and planetary exploration. 

Reflecting on the award, Prof Loy said: 

“I see this award as a testament to the long-standing culture at CCDS of doing rigorous research with real-world impact. Personally, it is a humbling affirmation of the collective work of my students, research fellows, and collaborators over the past decade. For CCDS, I hope it shines a light on our strengths in computer vision and learning, and on the supportive environment created by our leadership that enables ambitious, collaborative research to flourish.” 

He added: 

“I do not see fundamental research and real-world impact as opposing goals. Many of our core ideas were sharpened by constraints we discovered in the field, which became rigorous research questions in their own right. The loop is virtuous: real problems reveal new questions; principled methods feed back into practice; and successful deployments expose the next set of fundamentals to tackle.” 

At CCDS, Prof Loy serves as Deputy Director of the Centre for AI-for-X and Co-Associate Lab Director at S-Lab for Advanced Intelligence, where he leads mission-driven projects and cultivates talent. His group, MMLab@NTU, has nurtured students and fellows recognised with fellowships from Google, Apple, Meta, and AISG, with alumni now in leading roles across academia, research, and industry worldwide 

Looking ahead, Prof Loy encourages young researchers to pursue problem-first research and to embrace openness: 

“Impact follows when curiosity meets craftsmanship and community. Mentoring is central to my role, creating space for students and fellows to lead, to credit them visibly, and to celebrate their growth as independent researchers.” 

Prof Loy’s recognition with the IIT Bombay International Award not only celebrates individual excellence but also reflects CCDS’s mission to drive transformative research that advances both science and society.