Location:

Lecture Hall 12  | Cauerstr. 11 | 91058 Erlangen

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Program

Speaker:

Niloy Mitra is a Professor of Geometry Processing in the Department of Computer Science, University College London (UCL). He received his MS and PhD in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University under the guidance of Leonidas Guibas and Marc Levoy, and was a postdoctoral scholar with Helmut Pottmann at Technical University Vienna. His research interests include shape analysis, computational design and fabrication, and geometry processing. For details, please visit the SmartGeometryProcessing page. Niloy received the 2013 ACM Siggraph Significant New Researcher Award for “his outstanding work in discovery and use of structure and function in 3D objects” (UCL press release), the BCS Roger Needham award (BCS press release) in 2015, and the Eurographics Outstanding Technical Contributions Award in 2019. He received the ERC Starting Grant on SmartGeometry in 2013. His work has twice been featured as research highlights in the Communications of the ACM, twice been selected by ACM Siggraph/Siggraph Asia (both in 2017) for press release as research highlight. Niloy was elected as an Eurographics Fellow in 2021.

Holger Theisel is a full professor for Visual Computing at the University of Magdeburg (Germany). He received his M.S. (1994), Ph.D. (1996) and habilitation (2001) degrees from the University of Rostock (Germany) where he studied Computer Science (1989 – 1994) and worked as a research and teaching assistant (1995 – 2001). He spent 12 months (1994 – 1995) as a visiting scholar at Arizona State University (USA), and 6 months as a guest lecturer at ICIMAF Havana (Cuba). 2002 – 2006 he was a member of the Computer Graphics group at MPI Informatik Saarbrücken (Germany). 2006-2007 he was a professor for Computer Graphics at Bielefeld University (Germany). Since October 2007 he is at the University of Magdeburg.
His research interests focus on scientific visualization as well as on geometric modelling, geometry processing, information visualization and Visual Analytics. He co-authored more than 75 papers in the top journals in the field and received several best paper and honorable mention awards. Among others, he served as Paper Co-Chair EuroVis 2009, General Chair of the IEEE VIS 2018 conference in Berlin, Co-Chair of the IEEE VIS Executive Committee 2021-2023, Paper Co-Chair PacificVis 2021, Short Papers Co-Chair Eurographics 2021, and as Overall Paper Chair for IEEE VIS 2024-2025.

Philipp Slusallek is scientific director and member of the executive board at the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI), where he heads the research area on Agents and Simulated Reality. Prof. Slusallek co-founded and is director of strategy at the European AI initiative CAIRNE (https://cairne.eu/) since 2018. At Saarland University he has been a professor for computer graphics since 1999, a principle investigator at the German Excellence-Cluster on “Multimodal Computing and Interaction” from 2007 to 2019, and co-founder and director for research at the Intel Visual Computing Institute 2009-2017.
Before coming to Saarland University, he was a visiting assistant professor at Stanford University. He is a member of acatech (German National Academy of Science and Engineering), a fellow of Eurographics, and was a member of the High-Level Expert Group on Artificial Intelligence for the European Commission and an associate editor for Computer Graphics Forum.
He originally studied physics in Frankfurt and Tübingen (Diploma/MSc) and got his PhD in computer science from Erlangen University. His research covers a wide range of topics including artificial intelligence in a broad sense, simulated/digital reality, real-time and realistic graphics, high-performance computing and simulation, motion models and synthesis, novel programming models for CPU/GPU/FPGA, computational science, and others.

Justus Thies is a full professor for 3D Graphics & Vision at the Technical University of Darmstadt. Before joining TU Darmstadt, he was an independent research group leader at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems in Tübingen (2021-2023). He received his doctoral degree from the Friedrich Alexander University of Erlangen-Nuremberg in 2017 and worked as a postdoctoral researcher at TU Munich (2017-2021). His group works at the intersection of computer graphics, computer vision, and machine learning. Specifically, he is interested in AI-based methods to capture and to (re-)synthesize the real world using commodity hardware to enable teleconferencing and collaborative working in VR/AR. He has a strong focus on marker-less motion capturing of facial performances, human bodies, and general non-rigid objects, as well as AI-based synthesis techniques that allow for photorealistic image and video synthesis. He was recently awarded with the German Pattern Recognition Award 2024, the Eurographics Young Researcher Award 2024 and an ERC Starting Grant 2024.

Prof. Florian Rabe obtained his PhD in 2008 and his habilitation in 2014 at Jacobs University Bremen, initially focusing on logical and mathematical knowledge. Since 2018 he has been at LRI Paris and FAU, and has expanded his interests towards all aspects of knowledge. His research is characterized by an unusual breadth focusing on universal principles that transcend communities and systems. He is also a permanent visitor at Amazon Web Services, working on verifying safety-critical software. Florian Rabe is a researcher in knowledge representation with a focus on formal languages and their applications. His research has originally revolved around logic and mathematical knowledge, but he has expanded his scope towards all natural and social sciences. In all these fields the scale of the handled data has surpassed traditional non-machine-supported analysis techniques, with data sets routinely reaching millions of entries. Rabe’s research helps bridge between domain experts, who collect and work with the data, and computer scientists, who build the scalable digital infrastructure to support them.

Matthias Nießner is a Professor at the Technical University of Munich, where he leads the Visual Computing Lab. Before, he studied and completed his doctorate at FAU, and was a Visiting Assistant Professor at Stanford University. Prof. Nießner‘s research lies at the intersection of computer vision, graphics, and machine learning, where he is particularly interested in cutting-edge techniques for 3D reconstruction, semantic 3D scene understanding, video editing, and AI-driven video synthesis. In total, he has published over 150 academic publications, including 25 papers at the prestigious ACM Transactions on Graphics (SIGGRAPH / SIGGRAPH Asia) journal and 55 works at the leading vision conferences (CVPR, ECCV, ICCV); several of these works won best paper awards, including at SIGCHI‘14, HPG‘15, SPG‘18, and the SIGGRAPH‘16 Emerging Technologies Award for the best Live Demo. Prof. Nießner‘s work enjoys wide media coverage, with many articles featured in main-stream media including the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Spiegel, MIT Technological Review, and many more, and his was work led to several TV appearances such as on Jimmy Kimmel Live, where Prof. Nießner demonstrated the popular Face-2Face technique; Prof. Nießner‘s academic Youtube channel currently has over 5 million views. For his work, Prof. Nießner received several awards, f. e. the prestigious ERC Starting Grant 2018 which comes with 1.5 million Euro in research funding.

Jan Kautz is Vice President of Learning and Perception Research at NVIDIA. He and his team pursue fundamental research in AI, including foundation models, efficient AI, generative models, and visual perception. Their work has been given various awards and has been regularly featured in the media. Before joining NVIDIA in 2013, Jan was a tenured faculty member at University College London. He holds a degree in Computer Science from the University of Erlangen-Nürnberg (1999), an MMath from the University of Waterloo (1999), received his PhD from the Max-Planck-Institut für Informatik (2003), and worked as a post-doctoral researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (2003-2006).