Invited Speakers

Architect and Communication Designer, Paolo Ciuccarelli is Professor of Design at Northeastern after twenty years at Politecnico di Milano in Italy. At Politecnico he coordinated the Communication Design program (BSc and MSc), has been member of the board at the PhD in Design and he founded the DensityDesign Research Lab, an award winning laboratory for data visualization and information design. Paolo’s research focuses on the design transformations that help making sense of data and information to improve decision making processes, especially with non experts stakeholders and for controversial complex social issues where he’s also experimenting on the role of rhetorics and visual poetry for a deeper engagement. He also works in developing tools and methods to understanding the evolution of the design discipline in the frame of a meta-design approach. Paolo Ciuccarelli is author of best-paper awarded publications, lectured at Royal College of Arts, ENSCI Les Ateliers, Glasgow School of Arts, king’s College and Stanford Humanities Centre and has been invited to talk at conferences such as Eyeo, TEDx, Visualized, NetSci, Congreso Futuro. He has been member of the board of the Master in European Design (http://www.masterofeuropeandesign.com/.

Raja Bala is a Principal Applied Scientist in Amazon Fashion, where he leads research efforts in visual synthesis and human body modeling. Previously he led the Computer Vision group at Xerox PARC, building applications in diverse domains including health and beauty, transportation, and document imaging. He was also a Principal Engineer at Samsung where he developed computational image enhancement pipelines for Galaxy smartphones. Bala received a PhD in Electrical Engineering from Purdue University, and is a Fellow of IS&T.

Riccardo Marin is a Post Doctoral researcher, awarded with a Humboldt and a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Post-Doctoral Fellowships, at the University of Tübingen in the Real-Virtual Humans group led by Gerard Pons-Moll. Previously, he was a post-doc at Sapienza University of Rome in the GLADIA group led by Emanuele Rodolà, leading a work package for the SPECGEO ERC project. He followed the University of Verona’s Ph.D program in Computer Science, under the supervision of Umberto Castellani, collecting a Best PhD Thesis award by EG-Italy. He graduated in Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Verona (2017). He works on Spectral Shape Analysis, Shape Matching Geometric Deep Learning, and Virtual Humans. His work appeared in top-level conferences and journals (NeurIPS, IJCV, CVPR, ICCV, ECCV, CGF) and collected prestigious awards (Best Student Paper 3DV20, Top Cited CGF 2020-21, Best paper at NeurReps Workshop). He served as conference organizer (RCD Committee at SIGGRAPH, Volunteer Chair at 3DV18 and STAG21), as Associate Editor for AI Communications Journal, as a reviewer for several journals and conferences (PAMI, TCVG, CVPR, NeurIPS, ICLR, ICML), obtaining six Outstanding Reviewer Awards. He is a member of the Junior Fellow of Eurographics and of the European Lab for Learning and Intelligent Systems (ELLIS), and he got Italian professorships habilitation (ASN) for Computer Science (01/B1) and Information Engineering (09/H1).