Digital Human Workshop 2022

Overview

Human modeling Fully automatic generating high-quality human facial and body geometries and materials with limited input (e.g., images, videos, etc.) is one of the most challenged problems. Currently modeling process still need a lot of artist-based manual process.

Animation and interaction Animating characters from natural interactions, performance capture or control by artists with keeping those personalities remains much challenges.

Rendering and art Rendering characters in highly real time and photorealistic quality is competitive in recent industrial technologies, studied with full-stack optimization from chipset to high-level rendering algorithms. On the other hand, how to utilize components of art to improve user preference is worth to study.
Our workshop aims to gather a broad community of researchers and artist from academia and industry working in the field of digital human with a focus on modeling, animation and rendering. We hope that the workshop serves as a platform to foster collective efforts towards next-generation digital human technologies.


Taku Komura		Taku Komura joined Hong Kong University in 2020. Before joining HKU, he worked at the University of Edinburgh (2006-2020), City University of Hong Kong (2002-2006) and RIKEN (2000-2002). He received his BSc, MSc and PhD in Information Science from University of Tokyo. His research has focused on data-driven character animation, physically-based character animation, crowd simulation, 3D modelling, cloth animation, anatomy-based modelling and robotics. Recently, his main research interests have been on physically-based animation and the application of machine learning techniques for animation synthesis. He received the Royal Society Industry Fellowship (2014) and the Google AR/VR Research Award (2017)

Shunsuke Saito		Shunsuke Saito is a Research Scientist at Meta Reality Labs Research in Pittsburgh. He obtained his PhD degree at the University of Southern California. Prior to USC, he was a Visiting Researcher at University of Pennsylvania in 2014. He obtained his BE (2013), ME (2014) in Applied Physics at Waseda University. His work experience includes Yahoo Japan Corp. (2012-2013), Fove, Inc. (2015), Facebook Reality Labs Pittsburgh (2017), Pinscreen (2018), Adobe (2019), Facebook AI Research (2019), and Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems (2020) as a Research Intern. His research lies in digital human, 3D reconstruction, and performance capture. His work has been published in venues such as SIGGRAPH, SIGGRAPH Asia, NeurIPS, ECCV, ICCV and CVPR, two of which have also been nominated for CVPR Best Paper Award.

Hao Li		Hao Li is CEO and Co-Founder of Pinscreen, a startup that builds cutting edge AI-driven virtual avatar technologies, as well as Associate Professor at the Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence (MBZUAI), where he directs the MBZUAI Metaverse Lab. He was previously a Distinguished Fellow of the Computer Vision Group at UC Berkeley and Associate Professor of Computer Science at the University of Southern California, where he was also Director of the USC Institute for Creative Technologies. Hao's work in Computer Vision and Graphics focuses on 3D digitization and neural synthesis for immersive technologies and content creation. His research involves the development of novel deep learning, data-driven, and geometry processing algorithms. He is known for his seminal work in avatar creation, facial animation, hair digitization, dynamic shape processing, as well as his recent efforts in AI media synthesis and deepfake detection. He was also a visiting professor at Weta Digital, a research lead at Industrial Light & Magic / Lucasfilm, and a postdoctoral fellow at Columbia and Princeton Universities. He was named top 35 innovator under 35 by MIT Technology Review in 2013 and was also awarded the Google Faculty Award, the Okawa Foundation Research Grant, as well as the Andrew and Erna Viterbi Early Career Chair. He won the Office of Naval Research (ONR) Young Investigator Award in 2018 and was named named to the DARPA ISAT Study Group in 2019. In 2020, he won the ACM SIGGRAPH Real-Time Live! “Best in Show” award. Hao was speaker at the World Economic Forum in Davos in 2020 and exhibited at SXSW in 2022. His startup, Pinscreen, was recipient of the Epic Megagrants in 2021, and in 2022, Hao was featured in the first season of Amazon's documentary re:MARS Luminaries. Hao obtained his PhD at ETH Zurich and his MSc at the University of Karlsruhe (TH).

Rachel McDonnell		Rachel McDonnell is an Associate Professor of Creative Technologies at Trinity College Dublin, Ireland. Her research focusses on animation of virtual characters, using perception to both deepen our understanding of how virtual characters are perceived, and directly provide new algorithms and guidelines for industry developers on where to focus their efforts. She has published over 100 papers in conferences and journals in her field, including many top-tier publications at venues such as SIGGRAPH, Eurographics, and IEEE TVCG, etc. She serves as Associate Editor on journals such as ACM Transactions on Applied Perception and Computer Graphics Forum, and is a regular member of many international program committees (including ACM SIGGRAPH and Eurographics).

Hirokazu Yokohara		Artist Hirokazu Yokohara is involved in many high-end video productions in a wide variety of genres, specializing in 3D animation direction, concept design, art direction, etc.

Digital Human Workshop 2022

Date: Oct.5, 2022

Venue：Room A, Kyoto International Conference Center, Kyoto, Japan