Invited Talk by Matthias Niessner – Jan 21st 2021, 12h CET

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It is a great pleasure to announce a new guest presentation by Matthias Niessner from TU Munich!

Title: 3D Semantic Scene Understanding
Date: 21st of January, 2021, 12h, noon CET
Location: https://fau.zoom.us/j/93218875951?pwd=TXdVdi9nVTVRa09ya1V2aWk5Z0d1UT09

Abstract: In recent years, commodity 3D sensors, such as the Microsoft Kinect, have become easily and widely available. These advances in sensing technology have inspired significant interest in using the captured data for mapping and understanding 3D environments. In this talk, I will present our current research in this fascinating field, show potential future research directions, and talk about long-term goals. More specifically, I will show how we can now easily obtain a 3D reconstruction of an environment, and how we can exploit these results in order to infer semantics of a scene.

Bio:
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 70 academic publications, including 22 papers at the prestigious ACM Transactions on Graphics (SIGGRAPH / SIGGRAPH Asia) journal and 24 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 1.500.000 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 brand-new startup backed by Marc Cuban, whose aim is to empower storytellers with cutting-edge AI-driven video synthesis.