Biography
I am an Assistant Professor for 3D Computer Vision at the University of Amsterdam (UvA) since June 2022. My research is supported by an ERC Starting Grant (2025-2030).
Motivated & Creative students can contact me by following these instructions.
Earlier, I was a Research Scientist at the Perceiving Systems (PS) department at MPI for Intelligent Systems (MPI-IS).
Even earlier, I was a PostDoc at the same department (PS @ MPI-IS) advised by Michael Black.
I received a PhD from the University of Bonn for my thesis on Hand-Object Interaction advised by Juergen Gall.
I studied Electrical & Computer Engineering at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki advised by L. Hadjileontiadis.
Research Direction
I conduct research on the intersection of Computer Vision (CV), Computer Graphics (CG) and Machine Learning (ML). My motivation is to understand and model how people look, move and interact with the physical world and with each other to perform tasks.
This involves (1) accurately “capturing” real people and their whole-body interactions with scenes and objects, (2) modeling their shape, pose and interaction relationships, (3) applying these models to reconstruct real-life actions in 3D/4D, and (4) using these models to generate realistic interacting avatars in 3D/4D.
Potential applications include Ambient Intelligence, Virtual Assistants, Human-Computer/Robot Interaction, Mixed Reality and the “Metaverse”.
The long-term goal is to develop human-centered AI that perceives humans, understands their behavior and helps them to achieve their goals.
Recent News
Oct 2024: Guest lecture (research overview) at the CV1 course (UvA, MSc in AI) of Dr. M. Oswald.
Sep 2024: Talk @ ECCV workshop AI for 3D Content Creation. Download the slides here.
Sep 2024: Hiring PhDs! Awarded an ERC Starting Grant (€1.5M) for reconstructing Human-Object Interaction from images (UvA-IvI news, UvA news). 3x PhD positions are open.
Sep 2024: Hiring MSc! Hiring a MSc student for a thesis (Job Ad) at NAVER LABs (in Grenoble, France), together with Grégory Rogez & Philippe Weinzaepfel. UvA students can talk to me at Lab42. Possible PhD extension.
Sep 2024: New pre-print - SDFit recovers 3D object pose and shape from single images.
Sep 2024: Congrats to Sai for the ‘outstanding-reviewer’ award at ECCV'24!
Sep 2024: I will serve as Area Chair for CVPR 2025.
Aug 2024: New pre-print - CWGrasp generates realistic 3D whole-body grasps.
Aug 2024: Received a personal unrestricted Google Research Gift. Thanks Google and Nikos!
Aug 2024: Accepted paper at SIGGRAPH-Asia (TOG journal track) - PuzzleAvatar. Congrats Yuliang et al.!
Aug 2024: I start acting as secondary advisor for Lixin Xue (ETH, primary advisor Otmar Hilliges.
Aug 2024: I serve as an Area Chair for 3DV 2025.
Aug 2024: I start serving as coordinator for the Honours program of the BSc in AI @ UvA.
Jul 2024: Omid defends his PhD – summa cum laude. Congrats Dr. Omid!
The above is the most recent news. For the rest of news please click here.
Research Experience
Awards & Funding
Paper Awards
Best-paper finalist for SHAPY at CVPR 2022 (33 papers shortlisted out of 2064 ones; i.e. top 1.6%).
Honorable Mention award for InterCap at DAGM’s GCPR 2022.
Outstanding Reviewer (5x times): CVPR 2023 (top 3.5%), CVPR 2021 (top 20%), CVPR 2020 (top 3.9%), ECCV 2020 (top 7.6%), ICCV 2019 (top 3.6%).
Pre-PhD (diploma student) - ‘Epione’ project for Microsoft Imagine Cup software competition: Participation @ World Finals (2011) and Presentation to Microsoft’s CEO (08/07/2011, NYC; ~20 select teams). National Finals (Greece) place: 1st (2011), 2nd (2010). Honorary rector award (AUTH). Press e.g.: national, regional, TEDx.
Funding (public)
- ERC Starting Grant 2024 (€1.5M, 5 years) for reconstructing Human-Object Interaction from color images (project STRIPES, 101165317). Team: 3x PhDs and 1x PDoc.
- 1 PhD (350k€, 4 years, 2024–), ELLIS-Amsterdam call. Co-supervised with Otmar Hilliges (ETH) through ELLIS.
- 1 PhD (350k€, 4 years, 2023–), UvA, Part of tenure-track position. Co-supervised with Theo Gevers.
- 1 PhD & 1 PostDoc (140k€, 1 year, 2022), BMBF, ‘Machine Learning for Interacting Human Avatars’.
- 1 PhD (195k€ , 3 years, 2019–), BMBF, ‘Robust 3D Hand-Object Interaction’. Co-supervised with Michael J. Black (MPI-IS) & Cordelia Schmid (INRIA).
Funding (industry)
- Google Research Gift ($80k unrestricted). Investement for a GPU cluster node.
Memberships
Press / Media
- The New York Times (NYT) uses our ICON software (CVPR'21) to reconstruct key goals of the:
- NFL Super Bowl 2023 (American football league): Game article.
- FIFA World Cup 2022: Technical article (R&D), Game articles: game-1, game-2, game-3, game-4, game-5.
Service
Program Committee
Tutorials / Workshops
- CVPR 2021 – Co-organizer – Full-day Tutorial – ‘SMPL made Simple’
- CVPR 2024 – Co-organizer – Half-day Workshop – ‘Reconstruction of Human-Object Interactions (RHOBIN)’
PhD Defence Committee
| Name (Dr.) | Affiliation | Date | Note |
|---|---|---|---|
| Enric Corona | PhD defense at UPC (Barcelona) | 16/11/2023 | External committee member |
| Yahui Zhang | PhD defense at UvA (Amsterdam) | 20/12/2022 | Internal committee member |
| Vasileios Choutas | PhD defense at ETH (Zurich) | 02/12/2022 | I co-advised this thesis with M. J. Black at MPI-IS |
Reviewer
| Name | Conference / Journal | Year(s) |
|---|---|---|
| CVPR | Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition | 2016, 2019, 2020*, 2021*, 2023* |
| ICCV | International Conference on Computer Vision | 2019*, 2021 |
| ECCV | European Conference on Computer Vision | 2020 |
| IJCV | Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence | 2022-23 |
| TPAMI | Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence | 2016-17, 2020, 2023-24 |
| *Outstanding reviewer award |
Other: IJCV 2023, ICRA ( 2017, 2019 ), IROS 2017 , RA - L 2018 , NeurIPS 2018 , IEEE VR 2020, HRI 2016, IJCAI 2019.
Teaching
- Coordinator & Lecturer: Introduction to Computer Vision (UvA, BSc, semester 2, period 5)
- 2024: 150 students (expected) from 5+ programs (mainly AI).
- 2023: 263 students, from 5+ programs (mainly AI & CS). Co-taught with Rein van den Boomgaard.
Team
PhD candidates
Georgios Paschalidis
01/2024 - now @ UvA
Dimitrije Antić
03/2023 - now @ UvA
Sai Kumar Dwivedi
05/2021 - now @ MPI-IS
Co-advising with M. J. Black
Yuliang Xiu
11/2020 - now @ MPI-IS
Co-advising with M. J. Black
Interned as PhD: Ubisoft, Meta (soon)
Soon: Assist. Prof. @ Westlake University
Soon
PhD alumni
Omid Taheri
07/2018 - 07/2024 @ MPI-IS
Co-advising with M. J. Black
Interned as PhD: Adobe
Finalist for Meta PhD Scholarship
Next: PostDoc @ MPI-IS
Finalist for Meta PhD Scholarship
Next
Vasileios Choutas
05/2018 - 12/2022 @ MPI-IS
Co-advising with M. J. Black
Interned as PhD: Microsoft, Meta
Next: Research Scientist @ Google
Next
Long-term PhD collaborators
Lixin Xue
08/2024 - now @ ETH
PhD of O. Hilliges at ETH
I act as official secondary advisor
Shashank Tripathi
10/2021 - now @ MPI-IS
PhD of M. J. Black
During our collaboration:
- PhD Scholar @ Meta
- Intern @ EPIC
- PhD Scholar @ Meta
- Intern @ EPIC
Mohamed Hassan
01/2018 - 06/2020 @ MPI-IS
PhD of M. J. Black @ MPI-IS
After our collab: Intern @ Adobe
PhD interns
Yixin Chen
06/2022 - 12/2022 @ MPI-IS (remotely)
PhD of Song-Chun Zhu @ UCLA
Students (MSc/BSc)
| #MSc theses: | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Rick Akkerman | UvA | 11/2023- | Co-advised with V. F. Abrevaya, H. Feng. | Interaction-aware video synthesis |
| Alex Labro | UvA | 11/2023 - | Co-advised with G. Paschalidis. | 4D grasp synthesis |
| Romana Wilschut | UvA | 11/2022 - 08/2023 | Next: Intern at 3DUniversum | |
| David Hoffmann | MPI | 04/2018 - 01/2020 | Co-advised with Siyu Tang. | Next: PhD @ Uni-Freiburg/Bosch. |
| #BSc theses: | —— | ——————– | ——————————— | ———————– |
| Benjamin van Altena | UvA | 04/2023 - 07/2023 | Co-advised with Dimitrije Antić | |
| Roan van Blanken | UvA | 04/2023 - 07/2023 | Co-advised with Dimitrije Antić | Next: MSc in AI @ UvA |
Publications
Contact
- d.tzionas@uva.nl
- Science Park 900, Amsterdam, 1098 XH
- Building: Lab42 (Google Maps), Room L4.54