Miao Song completed her first Bachelor’s degree in Performance Arts and Direction in China. While in China, she worked in the Central Television Station as a TV director and journalist. She obtained her second Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Concordia University, Montreal, Canada, and her Master’s of Computer Science degree, also at Concordia, focussing on interactive real-time softbody simulation.

Miao Song completed the SIP PhD program with research involving a mix of interactive environments, cinema and documentaries, 3D computer graphics and realistic physical based simulation, and haptic responsive environments. The major component of the research described in her thesis is 3D computer graphics, specifically the realistic physics-based softbody simulation and haptic responsive environments. Minor components include advanced human-computer interaction environments, non-linear documentary storytelling, and theatre performance. The journey of this research has been unusual because it required a researcher with solid knowledge and background in multiple disciplines who also has to be creative and sensitive in order to combine the possible areas into a new research direction.

It focuses on the advanced computer graphics and emerges from experimental cinematic works and theatrical artistic practices. Some development content and installations are completed to prove and evaluate the described concepts and to be convincing. To summarize, the resulting work involves not only artistic creativity, but solving or combining technological hurdles in motion tracking, pattern recognition, force feedback control, etc., with the available documentary footage on film, video, or images, and text via a variety of devices and programming, and installing all the needed interfaces such that it all works in real-time.

Thus, the contribution to the knowledge advancement is in solving these interfacing problems and the real-time aspects of the interaction that have uses in film industry, fashion industry, new age interactive theatre, computer games, and web-based technologies and services for entertainment and education. It also includes building up on this experience to integrate Kinect- and haptic-based interaction, artistic scenery rendering, and other forms of control. This research work connects all the research disciplines, seemingly disjoint fields of research, such as computer graphics, documentary film, interactive media, and theatre performance together.

Miao has been awarded with various scholarship, grants for her research work. Her film project has been screened at national and international film festivals. 

Miao Song successfully defended her thesis in December 2012, and graduated at Spring Convocation 2013.