Abstract

In this talk I will survey some of my work in 3D graphics and geometry processing over the past decade related to the digital humanities. In particular, I will concentrate on three topics:

 1. Digital Heritage: Acquiring and processing 3D models of physical artifacts. This includes technologies for all stages of the acquisition pipeline: scanning, denoising, meshing, paramerterization, remeshing and compression

2. Digital Art: 2D and 3D animation techniques for art, entertainment and gaming applications. This includes 2D spatial deformation and 3D motion transfer techniques.

3. Augmented Environments: Using the new generation of  3D depth (RGBZ) cameras, e.g. Microsoft Kinect and Intel RealSense, to enable new applications: improve the interactive video chat experience with background subtraction, perspective correction, relighting and gaze-correction.

Bio

Craig Gotsman is Professor of Computer Science at the Jacobs Cornell-Technion Institute at Cornell Tech in New York City, where he also served as the first and founding director of the Institute during 2012-2014. Cornell Tech is a partnership between Cornell University and Technion – Israel Institute of Technology, dedicated to breeding a new generation of entrepreneurial engineers specializing in information sciences.

Holding Technion's Hewlett-Packard Endowed Chair in Computer Engineering since 2006, Gotsman co-founded the Technion Center for Graphics and Geometric Computing and is active in research on 3D computer graphics, geometric modeling, animation and geometry processing. Gotsman received his Ph.D. from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 1991. He has been a visiting professor at Harvard University, INRIA Sophia Antipolis (France) and ETH Zurich (Switzerland), and a research scientist at MIT. He has published more than 150 papers in the professional literature, won eight best paper awards at leading conferences and mentored more than 50 postgraduate level students (M.S., Ph.D. and postdoc). In 2015, Gotsman was elected to the Academy of Europe (Academia Europaea).

Beyond his academic work, Gotsman holds ten U.S. patents, and started three tech companies. Commercializing research done at the Technion, he co-founded Virtue 3D Inc. in 1997, whose geometry processing technology is now owned by NVIDIA. In 2000, he co-founded Estimotion Inc., (now ITIS Israel Ltd.), a startup that developed technology to generate real-time traffic information from cell phone and GPS-based location data. In 2014, he co-founded CatchEye to commercialize research done at ETH Zurich, improving the video chat experience using 3D depth camera technology. Gotsman has also consulted for numerous small and large companies, including Hewlett-Packard, Intel, Nokia, Shell Oil, Autodesk and Disney.