(remote participation)
Sun Joo (Grace) Ahn (Ph.D., Stanford University) is a Professor of Advertising at the Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication, University of Georgia. She is the founding director of the Center for Advanced Computer-Human Ecosystems (CACHE; www.ugavr.com) and the co-editor-in-chief of Media Psychology. Her main program of research investigates how immersive technologies such as virtual and augmented reality transform traditional rules of communication and social interactions, looking at how virtual experiences shape the way that people think, feel, and behave in the physical world. Her work is funded by the National Science Foundation, National Institutes of Health, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and the Environmental Protection Agency, and published in numerous top-tier outlets in the fields of communication, health, and engineering.
Talk:
Building Military Family Cohesion through Social XR: A 8-Week Field Study
Personal web 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:
Evaluation Methods for Social XR Experiences
Personal web page
Sergio Cabrero Barros leads the "Interactive Media Technology" research line at Vicomtech an applied research and technology center in Spain. Before, he worked for IBM Research Ireland (2018-2020), CWI (2014-2018) and Universidad de Oviedo (2007-2013). His current research interests include XR, multimedia and interactive systems. He has been involved in research projects across diverse sectors that range from music and gastronomy to automotive and security.
Talk:
Funding: The Path to Research Independence
Personal web page
Patrick Le Callet is currently full professor at Ecole polytechnique de l'université de Nantes. He has teaching as an Assistant professor from 1997 to 1999 and as a full time lecturer from 1999 to 2003 at the department of Electrical engineering of Technical Institute of University of Nantes (IUT). Since 2003 is teaching at Ecole polytechnique de l'université de Nantes (Engineer School) in the Electrical Engineering and the Computer Science departments. He is mostly engaged in research dealing with the application of human vision modeling in image and video processing. His current centers of interest are 3D image and video quality assessment, watermarking techniques and visual attention modeling and applications.
Talk:
QoE Assessment of XR
Personal web page
Elmar Eisemann is a professor at Delft University of Technology, heading the Computer Graphics and Visualization Group. His interests include real-time and perceptual rendering methods, visualization, data-driven graphics, and GPU acceleration techniques. He was honored with the Eurographics Young Researcher Award 2011, the Netherlands Prize for ICT Research 2019, and is a fellow of the Eurographics Association.
Talk:
Towards a Virtual Reality
Personal web page
Jan Gugenheimer is an Assistant Professor at TU-Darmstadt, heading the "Human-Computer Interaction" group. Prior he was a Maître de conférences for Computer Science at Télécom Paris, working on topics around Mixed Reality. He received his Ph.D. from Ulm University, working on Nomadic Virtual Reality. Jan worked within a variety of research labs at universities (ETH Zurich, MIT Media Lab) and research institutions (Daimler AG, IBM, Mercedes Benz, Microsoft Research). His work is frequently published and awarded at leading HCI conferences (UIST, CHI, CSCW). In his most recent research, Jan is exploring the potential negative and harmful impact of mixed reality
Talk:
Ubiquitous Mixed Reality: Designing Mixed Reality Technology to Fit into the Fabric of our Daily Lives
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
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:
Social Presence in VR - A Media Psychology Perspective
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:
Immersive Technologies Through the Lens of Public Values
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, Mozilla, and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.
Talk:
Designing Innovative Future XR Meeting Spaces
Personal web page
Debora Christina Muchaluat Saade holds a Computer Engineer bachelor's degree (1992), MsC in Computer Science (1996) and PhD in Computer Science (2003) from Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio de Janeiro (PUC-Rio). She is a full Professor at the Department of Computer Science of Fluminense Federal University (UFF). Her research interests are multimedia, mulsemedia, computer networks, wireless networks, smart grids, IoT, interactive digital TV and digital healthcare. She has contributed to the development of NCL (Nested Context Language) and Ginga-NCL, used in the Brazilian Digital TV Standard (ABNT NBR 15606-2) and IPTV services (ITU-T H.761).
Talk:
360° Multi-Sensory Experience Authoring
Personal web page
Dr Eleni Mangina is currently Professor at the School of Computer Science, University College Dublin in Ireland and the Vice Principal (International) for College of Science. She is guided by her own definition of the art of persistence, that involves both courage and compassion with research integrity and authenticity. Her lab operates at the intersection between applied Artificial Intelligence (VR/AR; Data Analytics; UAVs; Information Systems) and a portfolio development within interdisciplinary applications (i.e. Energy Sector and Educational Systems with XR).
Talk:
Navigating the Ethical Landscape of XR: Building a Necessary Framework
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:
Bringing Soul to Digital
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
Personal web page
Alexander Raake is a full professor at Ilmenau University of Technology (TU Ilmenau), Germany, heading the Audiovisual Technology group. In 2022, he has co-founded the cross-department Ilmenau Interactive Immersive Technologies Center (I3TC), for which he serves as the director. With his research team, he investigates the interaction between immersive audio, video and audiovisual technology and signal processing on the one hand, and human perception, interaction, communication and experience (e.g., in terms of Quality of Experience, QoE), on the other.
Talk:
Evaluating QoE for Social XR - Audio, Visual, Audiovisual and Communication Aspects
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:
Recent Advances in 3D Videocommunication
Personal web page
Lea Skorin-Kapov is Professor and head of the Multimedia Quality of Experience Research Lab (MUEXLab) at the University of Zagreb, Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computing. Her research interests include Quality of Experience assessment and modeling of multimedia and immersive media applications, QoE monitoring of encrypted video traffic, and cross-layer negotiation and management of QoE in networks.
Talk:
Social XR in 5G and Beyond: Use Cases, Requirements, and Standardization Activities
Personal web page
(remote participation)
Mel Slater is a Distinguished Investigator at the University of Barcelona in the Department of Clinical Psychology I also an active member of the Institute of Neurosciences. I was at ICREA 2006-2017. I am co-Director of the Event Lab (Experimental Virtual Environments for Neuroscience and Technology). His background is computer science in the field of computer graphics and virtual reality.
Talk:
Meeting Yourself and Others in Virtual Reality
Personal web page
Aljosa Smolic is Professor in the Computer Science Department of Hochschule Luzern in Switzerland and Co-Head of the Immersive Realities Research Lab. Before that, he was SFI Research Professor of Creative Technologies at Trinity College Dublin (TCD, 2016-2021), where he was heading the research group V-SENSE. His research interests include immersive technologies such as AR, VR, volumetric video, 360/omni-directional video, light-fields, and VFX/animation, with a special focus on deep learning in visual computing.
Talk:
Volumetric Content Creation for Immersive XR Experiences
Personal web page
Laura Toni is an associate professor in the Department of Electronic and Electrical Engineering at University College London (UCL), where she leads the Learning and Signal Processing (LASP). Her major contributions are in the area of multimedia systems, machine learning for immersive communication and large-scale signal processing for machine learning.
Talk:
The Power of Graphs Learning in Immersive Communications
Personal web page
Julie Williamson is a Senior Lecturer in Human Computer Interaction at the University of Glasgow in the internationally recognised Glasgow Interactive Systems (GIST) research group. My research focuses on how we connect in immersive environments by applying social signal processing to modelling behaviour in XR and understanding how we experience immersive realities together. The future of XR is social, but these experiences fall far short when compared to face-to-face interactions.
Talk:
Social Signal Processing as a Method for Modelling Behaviour in SocialXR
Personal web page
Benjamin de Wit is Founder and Director of VRDays Foundation and Immersive Tech Week, de Doelen, Rotterdam (since 2015). He worked in theater and digital media before founding Immersive Tech Week, a festival on the development of immersive technologies in business, science and the arts. With conferences, a trade show and a funding market, VRDays Europe Immersive Tech Week aims to unite the global XR and virtual worlds community, to inspire creative minds and to drive responsible innovation forward.
Talk:
Boundless Creativity: Bridging Sectors for Social Impact
LinkedIn
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. 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:
Virtual Humans in Social XR
Personal web page