Dr. Matthias Nießner is a Professor at the Technical University of Munich, where he leads the Visual Computing Lab. Before, he 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 Face2Face technique; Prof. Nießner’s academic Youtube channel currently has over 5 million views. For his work, Prof. Nießner received several awards: he is a TUM-IAS Rudolph Moessbauer Fellow (2017 – ongoing), he won the Google Faculty Award for Machine Perception (2017), the Nvidia Professor Partnership Award (2018), as well as the prestigious ERC Starting Grant 2018 which comes with 1.5 million Euro in research funding; in 2019, he received the Eurographics Young Researcher Award honoring the best upcoming graphics researcher in Europe. In addition to his academic impact, Prof. Nießner is a co-founder and director of Synthesia Inc., a startup dedicated to democratize synthetic media generation with cutting-edge AI-driven video synthesis technology. 

Homepage: https://niessnerlab.org/index.html.

Topic: Photo-realistic Avatar Reconstruction 

Dr. Thabo Beeler is currently a senior staff research scientist at Google, where he is heading the Syntec team within AR Perception. They work on digital humans in the context of virtual and augmented reality, focusing on capture, reconstruction, appearance acquisition, generative modeling, and synthesis. Prior to that he was a research scientist at Disney Research | Studios where he built up the Capture and Effects group, focusing on digital humans for film, producing the following products: seated high-quality dense performance measurement system Medusa;  unconstrained high-quality dense performance capture system Anyma. He has co-founded several startups focusing on various aspects of digital humans including Kapanu, ARBREA, Animatico and Gonym.

Homepage: https://thabobeeler.com/index.html

Fernando De la Torre received his B.Sc. degree in Telecommunications, as well as his M.Sc. and Ph. D degrees in Electronic Engineering from La Salle School of Engineering at Ramon Llull University, Barcelona, Spain in 1994, 1996, and 2002, respectively. He has been a research faculty member in the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University since 2005. In 2014 he founded FacioMetrics LLC to license technology for facial image analysis (acquired by Facebook in 2016). His research interests are in the fields of Computer Vision and Machine Learning. In particular, applications to human health, augmented reality, virtual reality, and methods that focus on the data (not the model). He is directing the Human Sensing Laboratory (HSL). 

Homepage: https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~ftorre/index.html