About

Hi! I am Postdoctoral Researcher at AIST in Tsukuba, Japan. As part of the Animāre project, I am currently working on developping malleable tools for anime creation.
I completed my PhD in Human-Computer Interaction in 2025, in the ex)situ team at Université Paris-Saclay, France, under the supervision of Theophanis Tsandilas and Adrien Bousseau.
My research interest lies in studying the practices (mostly sketch-based) of creative practitioners to design new tools supporting and extending these practices.
In my free time, I enjoy playing and listening to music, drawing and organizing quizzes for my friends!

News

2026/04/01
Started working as a postdoc at AIST in Japan under the supervision of Jun Kato.

2025/07/02
Defended my thesis in the middle of a heatwave!

2025/02
Helped organizing the Workshop on Creativity support for Hand-drawn Art Practices gathering researchers and artists of different practices ranging from anime to bande dessinée in Paris.

Research

Preview of STIVi showing the system in use.

STIVi: Turning Perspective Sketching Video into Interactive Tutorials

C. Nghiem, A. Bousseau, M. Sypesteyn, J.W. Hoftijzer, M. Agrawala, T. Tsandilas
Graphics Interface 2024

STIVi is a drawing tutorial system presenting instructional videos on perspective sketching with adapted augmentations. STIVi enables students to navigate and explore the video content at their own pace. A semi-automatic pipeline assists instructors in creating STIVi content by extracting pen strokes from video frames and aligning them with the accompanying audio commentary.

Project Page | Paper | Supplemental Material

Sketch Presentation for Product Design

C. Nghiem, A. Bousseau, M. Sypesteyn, J.W. Hoftijzer, T. Tsandilas
Conférence Francophone sur l'Interaction Humain-Machine -- IHM'24 Adjuncts (Work in Progress)

Industrial designers present their concepts at different stages of their process. Whereas sets of sketches are better suited for early stages, more polished, animated and more costly presentations are reserved for later stages when the design is better defined, to present the product in a lifelike, compelling manner. We study how to bridge this gap with the goal to provide sketch-based creation tools for dynamic presentations. To this end, we study current practices of designers, their visual language, typical techniques and their storytelling function through an analysis of existing presentation sketches.

Paper

Beyond the Static Sketch:
Augmenting Designers' Visual Vocabulary for Teaching and Presentation

C. Nghiem
PhD Thesis, 2025

During my PhD, I investigated how to support industrial designers' practices of communication sketching in two cases: (1) How can a sketching video tutorial be made easier to practice along for students through interaction? (2) How can new interactive systems support designers in their presentation process? In both cases, I identified and structured the visual vocabulary used by design experts and explored interactive tools that enhance their sketches, making communications more effective.