Symposium on Extended Reality

Dr. Mar Gonzalez-Franco is a Computer Scientist and Neuroscientist at Google working on a new generation of Immersive technologies. With a background in real-time systems in her research she tries to build better interactions for immersive technologies using different disciplines: Virtual Reality, Augmented Reality, Avatars, computer graphics, computer vision and haptics. All while studying human behavior, perception and neuroscience.

Priorly, she was Principal Researcher in the EPIC (Extended Perception Interaction and Cognition) team at Microsoft Research.

Dr. Gonzalez-Franco holds a BSc in Computer Science (URL, Barcelona) and MSc in Biomedical Engineering (Universitat de Barcelona and Tsinghua University). She earned her Ph.D. in Immersive Virtual Reality and Clinical Psychology under the supervision of Prof. Mel Slater at the EVENT-Lab, affiliated as a visiting student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, MediaLab. She completed her postdoctoral studies at University College London. Dr. Gonzalez-Franco is an expert advisor to governments (UN, US NSF, Canada NSERC, European Commission), as well as prolific scientist with publications and service as program committee, chair, and reviewed in top venues (IEEE & ACM conferences and transactions, Nature Publishing group, Science Robotics etc). She is often invited to write commentaries on her work for Scientific American and presents keynotes and interviews with international media including Bloomberg or The Royal Society. She was awarded the prestigious IEEE VR New researcher award in 2022. And since 2020, she is the Ethics and Diversity Chair of IEEE VGTC.

Apart from her prolific scientific output and academic recognitions, Dr. Gonzalez-Franco's work has also transferred to products used on a daily basis by many around the world, such as the Avatars and Together mode in Microsoft Teams and Microsoft Soundscape, as well as features on Hololens and Xbox. The release of Avatars in Teams was awarded Times invention of the year in 2022. And it is to date the largest deployment of avatars in any platform for productivity, available to the 270 million users of MS Teams. 

Steven M. LaValle is Professor of Computer Science and Engineering, in Particular Robotics and Virtual Reality, at the University of Oulu since 2018.  Since 2001, he has also been a professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Illinois.  He has also held positions at Stanford University and Iowa State University.  His research interests include robotics, virtual and augmented reality, sensing, planning algorithms, computational geometry, and control theory.  In research, he is mostly known for his introduction of the Rapidly exploring Random Tree (RRT) algorithm, which is widely used in robotics and other engineering fields.  In industry, he was an early founder and chief scientist of Oculus VR, acquired by Facebook in 2014, where he developed patented tracking technology for consumer virtual reality and led a team of perceptual psychologists to provide principled approaches to virtual reality system calibration, health and safety, and the design of comfortable user experiences.  From 2016 to 2017 he was Vice President and Chief Scientist of VR/AR/MR at Huawei Technologies, Ltd.  He has authored the books Planning Algorithms, Sensing and Filtering, and Virtual Reality.  He currently leads an Advanced Grant project from the European Research Council on the Foundations of Perception Engineering.

Serge Belongie is a professor of Computer Science at the University of Copenhagen, where he also serves as the head of the Pioneer Centre for Artificial Intelligence. Previously, he was a professor of Computer Science at Cornell University, an Associate Dean at Cornell Tech, and a member of the Visiting Faculty program at Google. His research interests include Computer Vision, Machine Learning, Augmented Reality, and Human-in-the-Loop Computing. He is also a co-founder of several companies including Digital Persona and Anchovi Labs. He is a recipient of the NSF CAREER Award, the Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship, the MIT Technology Review “Innovators Under 35” Award, and the Helmholtz Prize for fundamental contributions in Computer Vision. He is a member of the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters.

Peter has a bachelor's degree in Computer Graphics and Animation, with a Minor in Studio Art from DePaul University in Chicago. For the past 15 years he has been working on pioneering how 3D content can be used in valuable ways, and is paving the way forward for the Scandinavian XR industry. Professionally, he is the CTO and Co-founder of Khora, and partner at Khora Contemporary. Khora is a leading award-winning Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR) production studio based in Copenhagen, creating cutting edge content within multiple application areas. We are 40 full time employees, and over the last seven years we have produced more than 400 VR/AR applications and hosted more than 1500 workshops and events. We are exploring the value potential of VR and AR through meaningful collaborations and partnerships. We work within multiple industries, with a deep understanding of the technologies and of how and why businesses and institutions should work within these emerging mediums.