Observing and Understanding Hands in Action

Andrew Fitzgibbon: is a scientist with HoloLens at Microsoft, Cambridge, UK. He is best known for his work on 3D vision, having been a core contributor to the Emmy-award-winning 3D camera tracker “boujou” and Kinect for Xbox 360, but his interests are broad, spanning computer vision, graphics, machine learning, and occasionally a little neuroscience. He has published numerous highly-cited papers, and received many awards for his work, including ten “best paper” prizes at various venues, the Silver medal of the Royal Academy of Engineering, and the BCS Roger Needham award. He is a fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering, the British Computer Society, and the International Association for Pattern Recognition. Before joining Microsoft in 2005, he was a Royal Society University Research Fellow at Oxford University, having previously studied at Edinburgh University, Heriot-Watt University, and University College, Cork.

Tamim Asfour: is full professor at the Institute for Anthropomatics and Robotics, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) where he holds the chair of Humanoid Robotics Systems and is head of the High Performance Humanoid Technologies Lab (H2T). His current research interest is high performance 24/7 humanoid robotics. He is developer and leader of the development team of the ARMAR humanoid robot family. He has been active in the field of Humanoid Robotics for the last 17 years resulting in about 200 peer-reviewed publications with focus on engineering humanoids including humanoid mechatronics, grasping, dexterous and mobile manipulation, active perception, learning from human observation and experience as well as on the mechano-informatics of humanoids as the synergetic integration of mechatronics, informatics and artificial intelligence methods into integrated complete humanoid robot systems.

Christian Theobalt: is a Professor of Computer Science and the head of the research group "Graphics, Vision, & Video" at the Max-Planck-Institute (MPI) for Informatics, Saarbrücken, Germany and also at Saarland University, Germany. In his research he looks at algorithmic problems that lie at the intersection of Computer Graphics, Computer Vision and machine learning, such as: static and dynamic 3D scene reconstruction, marker-less motion and performance capture, virtual and augmented reality, computer animation, appearance and reflectance modelling, intrinsic video and inverse rendering, machine learning for graphics and vision, new sensors for 3D acquisition, advanced video processing, as well as image- and physically-based rendering. He is also interested in using reconstruction techniques for human computer interaction. For his work, he received several awards, including the Otto Hahn Medal of the Max-Planck Society in 2007, the EUROGRAPHICS Young Researcher Award in 2009, the German Pattern Recognition Award 2012, and the Karl Heinz Beckurts Award in 2017. He received an ERC Starting Grant in 2013 and an ERC Consolidator Grant in 2017. In 2015, he was elected as one of the top 40 innovation leaders under 40 in Germany by the business magazine Capital. He is also a co-founder of an award-winning spin-off company from his group - www.thecaptury.com - that is commercializing one of the most advanced solutions for marker-less motion and performance capture.

Robert Wang: is a Research Scientist at Oculus Research working on computer vision and tracking related to virtual reality. Prior to that he had co-founded a small company, Nimble VR née 3Gear Systems that built skeletal hand-tracking software which was acquired by Oculus. He received his Ph.D. in EECS while working in CSAIL at MIT with Jovan Popović. His research interests are in computer graphics, computer vision and human computer interaction. He attended Carnegie Mellon University as an undergraduate where he worked with Doug James and Jessica Hodgins.

Andrea Tagliasacchi: is an assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science of the University of Victoria (UVic), where he holds the Industrial Research Chair in 3D Sensing (Faculty of Engineering). He is currently on leave at Google/Canada as a visiting professor/researcher. Before joining UVic, he was a postdoctoral researcher at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL, Switzerland). He received both his B.Sc. (cum laude) and M.Sc (cum laude) from Politecnico di Milano (Polimi, Italy), and his Ph.D. from Simon Fraser University (SFU, Canada) funded by an NSERC Alexander Graham Bell fellowship.