Luc Van Gool is professor at the University of Leuven in Belgium, where he is the head of the computer vision group VISICS. This team of about 30 researchers focuses on the applications of computer vision in industry, communications, and services. The work ranges from fundamental to applied. The team is part of the ESAT laboratory, which is the department of electrical engineering and the Center for Processing Speech and Images PSI in particular.
Currently Luc Van Gool is coordinator of 3 European projects. He is cofounder and director of Eyetronics NV, a company offering low cost and easy to use technology for 3D modeling. He also is a member of the Research Council of the University of Leuven.
José Encarnação is a professor of computer science at the Technical University of Darmstadt, Germany, head of its Interactive Graphics Research Group, chair of the board of the Darmstadt Computer Graphics Center, and director of the Darmstadt R&D institute of the Fraunhofer Research Society. He serves as a consultant to government, industry, and several international institutions, and was a founder of Eurographics.
He is author of a large number of publications in internationally reviewed journals, and he is also author or coauthor of four textbooks in German and four in English. He is editor or coeditor of several books and many proceedings dealing with computer graphics and related applications. Encarnação is member of the editorial board of various professional journals like IEEE CG&A, Computer Graphics Forum, Visual Computer, and Computer Aided Geometric Design, and is the Editor in Chief of computers & graphics, an international journal on computer graphics published by Pergamon Press. In addition, he is the Managing Editor of the English technical book series Computer Graphics Systems and Applications" that is published by the Springer Verlag.
Prof. Encarnação holds a Dipl. Ing. and a Dr. Ing. in electrical engineering from the Technical University of Berlin. He is a member of GI, VDE, ACM, ACM Siggraph, IFIP WG5.2, and IFIP WG510.
Bianca Falcidieno is currently the Director of the Istituto per la Matematica Applicata, in Genova, Italy. Her research interests include Geometric Modelling, and Computational Geometry and their applications in Computer Graphics. She is leader of national and international projects on Computer Graphics. She has also written more than 100 refereed technical papers on subjects related to these fields.
As a member of various societies and associations (AICA, EUROGRAPHICS, GISIG, IFIP, ISO) she chaired some international conferences (Computer Graphics and Mathematics, EGIS 93, Modelling in Computer Graphics 93), in particular she has been programe chair of Shape Modelling International '97. Bianca Falcidieno is editor in chief of the International Journal on Shape Modelling, and member of the editorial boards of Computers & Graphics and Computer Graphics Forum.
She is the Italian Representative in IFIP Technical Committee n. 5 and coordinator of the national activity in Computer Graphics of the Italian Association for Computer Science (AICA).
Josef Hoschek is Professor at the department of Mathematics at the University of Technology in Darmstadt (TUD) and Director of the Centre for Applied Mathematics at TUD. He was Head of the Math. Department and Vice President of the TUD.
He started his academic career with research contributions to differential geometry, kinematics and applications of geometry. Later his research interests were focussed on Computer Aided Geometric Design especially geometric behaviour of spline surfaces, approximation and parametrization.
He is author of large number of publications in international reviewed journals. He received numerous invitations for invited talks, to be member of program committees, for guest editing, to be associate editor.
He is one of the two Editors in Chief of the journal Computer Aided Geometric Design, has published books on line geometry, cartography, descriptive geometry and computer aided geometric design and has edited a lot of proceedings to international conferences on CAGD, Reverse Engineering and Shape Fairing. He has organized many international conferences on topics in CAGD and Kinematics.
Mike Kelley is the Senior Director for Silicon Graphics, Inc.'s Advanced Graphics Engineering. His responsibilities include development of the Fahrenheit and OpenGL 3D APIs, and the Onyx2 Reality and Infinite Reality high-end visualization systems. Prior to his current position, Mike Kelley was the Director of Engineering for Cosmo Software, a provider of internet authoring tools and browsers that use VRML and Java. From 1989-1996, he worked in Apple Computer's Advanced Technology Group, and eventually as the Director of Interactive Graphics in the Interactive Media Group. This group shipped numerous award-winning breakthrough technologies, including QuickTime VR and QuickDraw 3D. From 1983-1989 he worked for Vertigo, Inc. and Cubicomp, Inc., two leading providers of high-end 3D animation software and turn-key systems. His individual contribution to research in 3D graphics is reflected by numerous patents in the area of acceleration of 3D rendering and high-quality 3D visualization. He has published three papers at the industry-leading SIGGRAPH conference, and has had his 3D hardware acceleration architectures presented at the HotChips Symposium. He majored in Mathematical Physics, with a minor in Philosophy, at Simon Fraser University, in British Columbia, Canada.
Claus-E. Liedtke received his Diplom and Dr.-Ing. degree from the Technische Universität Berlin, Germany. From 1973 to 1976 he had an appointment as Assistant Professor in the Departments of Computer Sciences and Laboratory Medicine and Pathology at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA. Since 1977 he is Professor for Digital Signal Processing in the Department of Electrical Engineering at the Universität Hannover. His present professional interests cover Model Based Analysis of Images and Image Sequences, Modelling of 3D-Scenes, and Knowledge Based Image Analysis. He is author and co-author of about 80 publications including a text-book, has received approximately 30 major grants from the German Science Foundation, various Ministries of the German Federal Government and the industry, and he has worked as consultant for several industrial and public institutions.
Professor Nadia Magnenat-Thalmann has pioneered research into Virtual Humans over the last 15 years, participating in and demonstrating some of the most spectacular state-of-the-art developments in the field, and is responsible for the rigorous and intensive academic research programs that made them possible. She studied at the University of Geneva and received her PhD in quantum physics and computer graphics in l977.
She was a professor at the University of Montreal in Canada from l977 to 1988 and received several awards during this period, including the l985 Communications Award from the Government of Quebec, and the l987 Woman of the Year nomination from the Montreal Urban Community.
In l989 she returned to Switzerland to found Miralab, an interdisciplinary creative research laboratory at the University of Geneva. Her main fields of interest are face-to-face interactions with virtual humans, the simulation of realistic physicaly based fabrics models for fashion shows, the recreation of virtual inhabitants of cultural heritage sites and the simulation of virtual patients for medical applications.
Some of her awards for this work include the l992 Moebius Prize for the best multimedia system awarded by the European Community, " Best Paper” at the British Computer Graphics Society congress in l993, election at the Synthese congress in Brussels, in l993, to the International Academy, for her work in virtual worlds, and election to the Swiss Academy of Technical Sciences, in l997.
She has been invited to give hundreds of lectures on interdisciplinary topics, all related to virtual worlds, has published a large number of technical papers, and has directed and produced several films, among them DREAMFLIGHT (l982), RENDEZVOUS IN MONTREAL (l987), MARILYN IN GENEVA (l995), THE TERRA COTTA SOLDIERS ARMY (l997) and MARILYN AT THE UNITED NATIONS l997). She was a major partner in the breakthrough telepresence interactions between virtual avatars in Singapore and Geneva at TELECOM l995 and the real time tennis game between Los Angeles and Geneva (Virtual Humans'97).
Professor Nadia Magnenat-Thalmann is President of the Computer Graphics Society and Chair of the IFIP Working Group 5.10 in Computer Graphics and Virtual Worlds. She is also editor of several journals, among them The Visual Computer and The Visualization and Computer Animation Journal.
is Professor in the College of Computing at Georgia Institute of Technology and the Director of GVU, Georgia Tech's Graphics, Visualization, and Usability Center, which involves 51 faculty members and over 160 graduate students focused on technologies that make humans more effective. Prior to joining Georgia Tech, he worked at the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center as the Strategist for Visualization; the Senior Manager of the Visualization, Interaction, and Graphics department; and the Manager of several IBM's graphics products: 3DIX, Data Explorer, and PanoramIX.
His research interests focus on 3D geometric modeling and graphics, and on interactive and intuitive techniques for collaborative 3D design and inspection. He received numerous Best Paper and Invention awards, chaired 12 conferences, workshops, and program committees in Graphics, Solid Modeling, and Computational Geometry, guest edited 7 special issues of professional journals, and coauthored 13 patents. He holds a PhD in EE from the University of Rochester, New York in the area of Solid Modeling and a Diplome d'Ingenieur from the ENSEM in Nancy, France.
Dr. Wolter is currently head of the Computer Science Institute at the University of Hannover. He is a full professor in the department of mathematics and director of the Welfen Laboratory i.e. the Computer Graphics Division at the University of Hannover. He holds the foundational chaired professorship for Computer Graphics at the University of Hannover. Before coming to Hannover, he hold faculty positions at the University of Hamburg (Germany), MIT (USA) and Purdue University (USA). Prior to this he developed industrial expertise as a software and development engineer with AEG (Mercedes) in Germany. At MIT, Dr. Wolter codeveloped from 1989 to 1993 the geometric modeling system Praxiteles at MIT for the US Navy.