Evangelos Alexiou received his Ph.D. in Electrical and Electronic Engineering from École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), Switzerland, in 2020, as a member of the MultiMedia and Signal Processing Group (MMSPG). He was a postdoctoral researcher in the Distributed and Interactive Systems (DIS) group at Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica (CWI), The Netherlands, between 2021 and 2022. He is currently working as a research scientist and innovator at The Netherlands Organization for Applied Research (TNO), The Netherlands, focusing on multimedia systems and MPEG standardization activities. His research interests include immersive multimedia compression, streaming, and quality assessment.
Talk:
Perceptual Quality Assessment of Point Clouds
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Google Scholar page
(remote participation)
Mark Billinghurst is the Director of the Empathic Computing Laboratory at the University of South Australia, and University of Auckland. His main research expertise is in the use of AR, VR and Empathic Computing to enhance face to face and remote collaboration. He is a Fellow of the IEEE, a Fellow of the Royal Society of New Zealand, a member of the CHI Academy, and of the VGTC VR Academy.
Talk:
Using Empathic Computing to Create Social XR Experiences
Personal web page
Stephen Brewster is a Professor of Human-Computer Interaction in the School of Computing Science at the University of Glasgow. He leads the Multimodal Interaction Group, which is very active and has a strong international reputation in HCI (http://mig.dcs.gla.ac.uk). His research focuses on multimodal HCI, or using multiple sensory modalities and control mechanisms (particularly audio, haptics and gesture) to create a rich, natural interaction between human and computer.
Talk:
eXtended Reality and Passengers of the Future
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Personal web page
Wendy Van den Broeck is an Assistant Professor in communication studies at Vrije Universiteit Brussel. She is also head of the Media, Marketing and User Experience Unit of the imec-smit research group. Her main research expertise is in the domain of personalised and immersive media and living lab research methodology.
Talk:
Discovering Horizon Europe Projects: TRANSMIXR - Ignite the Immersive Media Sector by Enabling New Narrative Visions
Personal web page
(remote participation)
Dr Mar Gonzalez Franco is a neuroscientist and a computer scientist working on research at the forefront of VR/AR.
Talk:
Movement Remapping as a Solution to Interaction
Personal web page
Jesús Gutiérrez is assistant professor at the Image Processing Group (GTI) of the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid (UPM), Spain. His research interests are in the area of image and video processing, evaluation of user quality of experience, immersive media technologies, and visual attention and human perception. Currently, he is the chair of Immersive Media Group (IMG) of the Video Quality Experts Group (VQEG).
Talk:
An Overview on Standardization for Social XR
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Personal web page
Dr. Tilo Hartmann is professor and chair of the Department of Communication Science at the VU Amsterdam. He applies media-psychological approaches and methods to study questions such as why people use immersive media technologies, how they subjectively experience and perceive these technologies (e.g., presence), and how they are affected by their use (e.g., learning, psychological wellbeing, mental health effects).
Talk:
The Psychology of Social Presence
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Personal web page
Mariëtte van Huijstee, PhD. thinks and speaks about corporate social responsibility and the impact of technology on public life. She works as a Coordinator at the Dutch Technology Assessment Institute, the Rathenau Instituut, where she leads a team of researchers studying and debating Responsible Technology. Dr. van Huijstee holds a PhD. in corporate social responsibility from the Copernicus Institute on Sustainable Development and Innovation.
Talk:
Towards a Responsible Metaverse
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Personal web page
Gijs Huisman is an assistant professor of embodied interaction design. His work centres on understanding technologically mediated, tangible, social interactions from the cross section of interaction design, cognitive science, and philosophy.
Talk:
Understanding Social Touch in XR
Personal web page
(remote participation)
Katherine Isbister is Jack Baskin Chair in Engineering and Professor of Computational Media at University of California Santa Cruz. Her team takes a research-through-design approach to creating socially and emotionally supportive XR experiences, with funding from the US National Science Foundation and Mozilla.
Talk:
Designing 'Weird' Social Experiences for XR
Personal web page
Dr. Jie Li is an HCI researcher with a background in Industrial Design Engineering. Her research focuses on developing evaluation metrics for immersive experiences. She is now the head of Research & Insight (NL) at EPAM and a creative cake designer owning a boutique café called Cake Researcher (https://www.cake-researcher.com/).
Talk:
Design, Develop and Evaluate Social XR Experiences
Personal web page
In addition to his role as coordinator of the HORIZON Europe TRANSMIXR project, Niall Murray (Member, IEEE) is a Senior Lecturer with the Faculty of Engineering and Informatics, Technological University of the Shannon (Athlone Campus), Ireland. He is also the Founder, in 2014, and thePrincipal Investigator (PI) in the truly Immersive and Interactive Multimedia Experiences (tIIMEx) Research Group in TUS. He is a Science Foundation Ireland(SFI) Funded Investigator (FI) with the SFI Adapt Centre for AI enabled Digital Content and an FI with the Confirm Centre for Smart manufacturing. His current research interests include immersive and multisensory multimedia communication and applications, multimedia signal processing, QoE, and wearable sensor systems.
Talk:
Discovering Horizon Europe Projects: TRANSMIXR - Ignite the Immersive Media Sector by Enabling New Narrative Visions
Personal web page
(remote participation)
Klara Nahrstedt is the Grainger Chair in Engineering Professor in the Computer Science Department, and the Director of Coordinated Science Laboratory in the Grainger College of Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Her research interests are directed toward tele-immersive systems, end-to-end Quality of Service (QoS), and cyber-physical systems. Klara Nahrstedt received her Diploma in Mathematics from Humboldt University, Berlin, Germany in 1985. In 1995, PhD from the University of Pennsylvania in the Department of Computer and Information Science. She is Fellow of ACM, IEEE, AAAS, Member of the German National Academy of Sciences (Leopoldina Society), and Member of the USA National Academy of Engineering.
Talk:
Navigation and View Management for Interactive 360 Streaming Systems
Personal web page
Johan Oomen works at the Netherlands Institute for Sound & Vision as manager Research and Heritage. He is also a researcher with the 'User Centric Data Science' research group at the Vrije Universiteit. He is also secretary of the PublicSpaces foundation, co-initiator of the Culture and Media working group within the National AI Coalition and chairman of the EUscreen Foundation. Johan Oomen is a member of the National Heritage Research Council, the NDE Domain Group Usable and the advisory board of Europeana Foundation.
Talk:
Discovering Horizon Europe Projects: TRANSMIXR - Ignite the Immersive Media Sector by Enabling New Narrative Visions
Personal web page
Prof Sylvia Xueni Pan PhD is a Professor of VR at Goldsmiths, University of London. She co-leads the Goldsmiths Social, Empathic, and Embodied VR lab (SeeVR Lab) and the MA/MSc in Virtual and Augmented Reality programme at Goldsmiths Computing. Her research interest is the use of Virtual Reality as a medium for real-time social interaction, in particular in the application areas of training and therapy.
Talk:
Virtual Social Interaction and its Applications in Health and Healthcare
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Personal web page
Natasja Paulssen started out as an IT engineer and has now been fully converted to the creative industries. She founded 2 companies: in 2011 Dutch Rose Media which is among the first 100% Augmented Reality design agencies. And in 2019 she founded 4DR Studios, the first Volumetric Capture stage in the Benelux.
Talk:
Pre & Post for Volumetric Video
LinkedIn
Pablo Pérez is lead scientist at Nokia Extended Reality Lab in Madrid, Spain. He is currently leading the scientific activities of Nokia XR Lab, addressing the end-to-end technological chain of the use of Extended Reality for human communication: networking, system architecture, processing algorithms, quality of experience and human-computer interaction. He is also Nokia delegate in ITU-T SG12 and member of the board of VQEG.
Talk:
An Overview on Standardization for Social XR
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Personal web page
Stefan is a researcher and has been working at the Rathenau Instituut since 2021. Currently, he is investigating the upcoming metaverse and the societal risks and opportunities that might come along with this new technology. Furthermore, he investigates the digital dependency of European democracies on Big Tech companies
Talk:
Towards a Responsible Metaverse
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Personal web page
Dr. Oliver Schreer is head of “Immersive Media & Communication” research group at “Vision & Imaging Technologies” department at Fraunhofer Heinrich Hertz Institute (HHI) and Associate Professor at Technical University Berlin. His main research fields are 3D video processing and immersive and interactive media services and applications exploiting Augmented and Virtual Reality technologies.
Talk:
A Journey to Volumetric Video - the Past, the Present and the Future
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Personal web page
Christian Timmerer is a Full Professor of Multimedia Systems at the University of Klagenfurt and Director of the Christian Doppler Laboratory ATHENA. His research interests include multimedia systems, immersive multimedia communication, video streaming, video adaptation, and Quality of Experience, where he published more than 300 papers. In 2012 he co-founded Bitmovin, where he holds the position of the Chief Innovation Officer (CIO) - Head of Research and Standardization.
Talk:
Immersive Video Delivery: From Omnidirectional Video to Holography
Personal web page
Maria Torres Vega is a tenure track assistant professor at KU Leuven (Belgium) since October 2022. Maria obtained a Master in Telecommunication Engineering from the Polytechnic University of Madrid (Madrid) in 2009. She obtained her PhD at Eindhoven University of Technology (The Netherlands) in 2017 on the topic of perception modelling of video streaming services. Between the end of her PhD and the starting of her tenure track, Maria was a postdoctoral researcher at Ghent University (Belgium). Maria's research focuses on immersive multimedia streaming services, network management, control systems and Quality of Experience.
Talk:
Enabling Interactive Networked Virtual Reality Experiences
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Personal web page
Dr. Zerrin Yumak is an assistant professor in the Human-Centered Computing Group at the Information and Computing Sciences Department of Utrecht University. She is the scientific director of the Motion Capture and Virtual Reality Lab (https://www.uu.nl/mocapvrlab). She has 15 years of experience in the area of believable virtual humans and social robots, in particular on non-verbal behavior synthesis, multi-party interaction and emotion and memory modeling.
Talk:
How to Create Virtual Humans and Avatars for Social XR?
Personal web page
