Erik Reinhard, Distinguished Scientist at InterDigital
Lights, Camera, Climate Action!

From production to transmission and final consumption in cinemas and at home: movies, series and other (live) programmes all cost non-trivial amounts of energy to produce, process, transmit and display. Advances in framerate, colour gamut, dynamic range and pixel resolution all have a further energetic impact, as does the introduction of new media, and the move from traditional broadcast to streaming technologies. The aim of this presentation is to create awareness of the magnitude of the problem, to show what efforts are underway (production, certification, standardization, image processing, displays), and where opportunities lie to do better.

Erik Reinhard is Distinguished Scientist at InterDigital, a research, innovation and licensing company in wireless and video communication. He participates in sustainability programs at ITU-R, DVB, and SMPTE. He currently uses his expertise in color science, image/video processing and psychophysics to reduce the environmental impact of video communication and display.

Ben Cowell-Thomas, DFX Supervisor at DNEG
A New Era for the VFX Industry? – How DNEG Utilised Gaming Technology for The Matrix Resurrections

In this session Ben Cowell-Thomas, DFX Supervisor at DNEG, will be breaking down The Matrix Resurrections’ dojo fight sequence. He’ll specifically focus on how DNEG utilised Unreal Engine for rendering, why this convergence of gaming and VFX technology is so exciting, and the benefits it offers to filmmakers. He’ll also look forward to the near future to discuss the technology innovations that will positively impact the VFX and film industry, and why they should be embraced.

Ben Cowell-Thomas is a DFX Supervisor at DNEG with over 20 years of VFX industry experience. After graduating from Bournemouth University, he started his career in education heading up the Animation and VFX course at Temasek Polytechnic Singapore. He spent three years in Sydney, before returning to the UK and working as Head of Studio / VFX Supervisor at Nexus Studios in London. Switching his focus from TV to feature film, Ben joined DNEG in 2016. His impressive filmography includes ‘Star Trek Beyond’, ‘Justice League’, ‘Deadpool 2’, ‘Avengers: Endgame’, ‘Fast & Furious 9’, and ‘The Matrix Resurrections’.

Bernd Bickel, Professor at IST Austria
Reimagining Design and Fabrication with Computational and Data-Driven Methods

Advanced fabrication techniques have grown in sophistication over the last decade, vastly extending the scope of structures and materials that can be manufactured. While providing new opportunities for personalized fabrication, product design, engineering, architecture, art, and science, the potential impact of these techniques is tightly coupled with the availability of efficient computational methods for design.

In this talk, I will describe how techniques from visual computing enable the transformation of design workflows. I will first introduce a generic optimization approach based on the extended finite element method, which allows for the optimization of a wide range of design objectives directly on parameterized 3D CAD models. Leveraging optimization-based design and a tailored data-driven model of the materials’ responses, I will then introduce novel approaches for interactive shape exploration and demonstrate its applicability to designing cold-bent glass facades and deployable structures. Furthermore, I will show how insights from geometry can be used to derive an intuitive and rigorous characterization of the design space of planar elastic rods, which can be shaped into intriguing curved elements.

Finally, I will reflect on the successes and the challenges of algorithms and artificial intelligence as tools for the future of design and discuss research opportunities in this area.

Bernd Bickel is a Professor at IST Austria, heading the Computer Graphics and Digital Fabrication group, and a senior research scientist at Google. He is a computer scientist interested in computer graphics and its overlap into robotics, computer vision, machine learning, material science, and digital fabrication. His main objective is to push the boundaries of how digital content can be efficiently created, simulated, and reproduced.

Bernd obtained a PhD in Computer Science from ETH Zurich in 2010. From 2011-2012, Bernd was a visiting professor at TU Berlin, and in 2012 he became a research scientist and research group leader at Disney Research. In early 2015 he joined IST Austria. He received the ETH Medal for Outstanding Doctoral Thesis in 2011, the Eurographics Best PhD Award in 2012, the Microsoft Visual Computing Award in 2015, an ERC Starting Grant in 2016, the ACM SIGGRAPH Significant New Researcher Award in 2017, and a technical achievement award from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in 2019.

Belen Masia, Associate Professor at Universidad de Zaragoza
Modeling attention and gaze behavior in immersive environments

Creating engaging and compelling experiences in Virtual Reality is a challenging task: large bandwidth, computation and memory requirements are limiting factors; on top of that, there is the added difficulty of designing content for users who have control over the point of view. We argue that understanding user behavior and attention in immersive environments can help address these challenges. In this talk, we explore approaches to modeling visual attention and gaze behavior in 360º environments. Applications range from compression to realistic avatar simulation or scene content design, as well as furthering our understanding of human perception, and in particular how we selectively process the sensory information we receive.

Belen Masia is an Associate Professor in the Computer Science Department at Universidad de Zaragoza, and a member of the Graphics and Imaging Lab. Before, she was a postdoctoral researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Informatics. Her research focuses on the areas of appearance modeling, applied perception and virtual reality. She is a Eurographics Junior Fellow, and the recipient of a Eurographics Young Researcher Award in 2017, a Eurographics PhD Award in 2015, an award to the top ten innovators below 35 in Spain from MIT Technology Review in 2014, and an NVIDIA Graduate Fellowship in 2012. She is also a co-founder of DIVE Medical, a startup devoted to enabling an automatic, fast, and accurate exploration of the visual function, even in non-verbal patients.