The list of instructors is currently tentative. Please come back for updates.

Carolina Cruz-Neira, University of Louisiana, Lafayette, USA

Dr. Carolina Cruz-Neira is the Executive Director and Chief Scientist of the Louisiana Immersive Technologies Enterprise (LITE). She is also an Endowed Chair in the College of Engineering at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. Until 2005 she was the Stanley Chair in Interdisciplinary Engineering, and the Associate Director and co-founder of the Virtual Reality Applications Center at Iowa State University (ISU). In 2002, she co-founded and co-directed the Human-Computer Interaction graduate program at ISU. Dr. Cruz-Neira’s work in VR started with her Ph.D. disserta- tion: the design of the CAVETM Virtual Reality Environment, the CAVETM Library software specifications and implementa- tion, and preliminary research on CAVETM-Supercomputing integration. She shares the recognition of the Invention of the CAVE with Tom DeFanti and Dan Sandin. Since then, her research has been driven by providing applicability and simplicity to VR technology focusing on software engineering for VR, applications of VR technology and usability studies of virtual environments. She spearheaded the open- source VR API movement with the development of VR Juggler, and has been an advocate of best practices on how to build and run VR facilities and applications. Many of her former students are now doing leading work in VR at places such as Purdue University, Navtech, Nintendo, EA, Deere & Company, Boeing, Sony Pictures Imageworks, and Argonne National Laboratory.

Anthony Steed, University College London, UK

Anthony Steed is a Professor in and head of the Virtual Environments and Computer Graphics group in the Department of Computer Science, University College London. His research area is in real-time interactive virtual environments, with particular interest in mixed-reality systems, large-scale models and collaboration between immersive facilities. The group runs a CAVE-like facility. Anthony Steed is superviser for several doctoral students Vijay Pawar (writing up), Jeren Chen (writing up), Jason Drummond (writing up), Jozef Dobos, Pan Ye, Julian Hodgson and Sebastian Friston. Anthony Steed is currently deputy head of department. He was director of the Engineering Doctorate Centre in Virtual Environment, Imaging and Visualisation from 2005- 2013. Previously he was responsible for external relations for the department and he remains active in a number of technology transfer iniatives. Anthony also consult to a small number of companies in areas related to graphics or new media. Finally, he is the CTO and founder of Animal Systems (ASIO Ltd), creators of Chirp.

Frank Steinicke, University of Würzburg, GER

Frank Steinicke is a professor in Computer Science in Media at the Department of Computer Science at the University of Würzburg and chair of the Immersive Media Group. Since 2012 he is the director of the Institute of Human Computer Media. His research interests include the topics of user interfaces between humans and computers with a special focus on virtual reality, visual perception and human computer interaction. Frank Steinicke studied Mathematics with a minor in Computer Science at the University of Münster and completed with a diploma in 2002. In 2006 he obtained the doctoral degree in computer graphics and visualization from the Department of Computer Science at the University of Münster. Afterwards, Frank Steinicke assumed a visiting professor position at the Department of Computer Science at the University of Minnesota, USA in 2009. In 2010 he received the venia legendi in Computer Science from the University of Münster.

Greg Welch, University of Central Florida, USA

Greg Welch is a Research Professor in the Institute for Simulation & Training and the Department of Computer Science at The University of Central Florida, and the Department of Computer Science at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. In 1986 he received a degree in Electrical Technology from Purdue University (with Highest Distinction), and in 1996 a Ph.D. in Computer Science from UNC-Chapel Hill. Prior to UNC he worked on the Voyager Spacecraft Project at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and on airborne electronic countermeasures at Northrop-Grumman’s Defense Systems Division. His current research interests include virtual and augmented reality, human tracking systems, 3D telepresence, computer vision, and stochastic estimation. He has co-authored over 50 publications in these areas, and is a co-inventor on multiple patents. He has served on numerous international program committees, co-chaired workshops and seminars, and is an Associate Editor for the journal Presence: Teleoperators and Virtual Environments. He maintains an internationally-recognized web site dedicated to the Kalman filter. He is a member of the IEEE Computer Society and ACM.

Marc Erich Latoschik, University of Würzburg, GER

Marc studied mathematics and computer sciences at the University of Paderborn, the New York Institute of Technology and the Bielefeld University. After several accompanying years in the computer business, he received his PhD in 2001 in the area of multimodal–gesture and speech–interaction for Virtual Reality. He headed the AI & VR Lab at the Bielefeld University until 2007, became professor for media informatics at the University of Applied Sciences (HTW) in Berlin, and founded the Intelligent Graphics Group at Bayreuth University in 2009. Marc holds the chair for human-computer interaction at Würzburg University since 2011. His work is interdisciplinary oriented towards human-computer interaction interconnecting real-time 3D graphics and simulation, virtual and augmented environments, AI, and cognitive sciences.

Stefan Kopp, University of Bielefeld, GER

Stefan Kopp leads the socal agents group of the “Cognitive Interaction Technology” center of excellence at Bielefeld. His research projects target systems and tools to make machines conversational, cooperative, convergent, and companionable, and to explore these abilities in novel human-machine interaction scenarios. He explores how technical systems can turn into intuitive, socially adept interaction partners. To this end, his group studies the behavioral and cognitive processes that underlie human face-to-face communication, and he develops methods to synthesize such abilities in machines. Stefan is particularly interested in models that enable human-like multimodality, adaptativity, and cooperation in dyamic conversational or task-based interaction. Using 3D virtual humans or humanoid robots, his group applies and evaluates those models for novel human-machine interaction scenarios and experiments.

Frank Puppe, University of Würzburg, GER

Prof. Dr. Frank Puppe holds the chair for Artificial Intelligence and Applied Informatics at the institute for informatics at Würzburg University. His research interests comprise all aspects of knowledge management systems and tutoring systems and their practical application in medical, technical and other domains including heuristic, model-based and case-base problem solving methods, knowledge acquisition and machine learning, intelligent user interfaces.

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Contact:


HCI group
University of Würzburg
Am Hubland
97074 Würzburg
Germany

Secretary:


Ilka Steinicke
+49 (0) 931 31 86489

Mo-Fr 9-13 Uhr

Location:


Map