Dimitris Tzionas

Dimitris Tzionas

Assistant Professor

University of Amsterdam

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

All 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

 
 
 
 
 
University of Amsterdam (UvA)
Assistant Professor
University of Amsterdam (UvA)
June 2022 – Present Amsterdam
Establishing a new research direction at the UvA on 3D Virtual Humans (3D/4D perception from images/videos, and 3D/4D synthesis). Teaching ‘Introduction to Computer Vision’ for the BSc in AI. Embedded in the Computer Vision lab.
 
 
 
 
 
Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems (MPI-IS)
Research Scientist
Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems (MPI-IS)
October 2018 – May 2022 Tübingen
The Research Scientist role (see description) in research institutes is roughly equivalent to an Assistant Professor at universities. Co-advising PhDs and co-leading part of the PS department’s research agenda.
 
 
 
 
 
Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems (MPI-IS)
PostDoc
Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems (MPI-IS)
October 2016 – October 2018 Tübingen
Working on 3D hand modeling (MANO, whole-body modeling and registration to 4D scans (SMPL+H), and 3D hand+object reconstruction from a color image (ObMan). Working at the PS department with Michael J. Black and Javier Romero.
 
 
 
 
 
University of Bonn
PhD
University of Bonn
May 2012 – August 2016 Bonn
PhD thesis on ‘Capturing Hand-Object Interaction and Reconstruction of Manipulated Objects’ from RGB-D input. Working under the advice of Prof. Juergen Gall.

Awards & Funding

Paper Awards

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

  • ELLIS society member since April 2022. Endorsed by Otmar Hilliges (ETH) & Marc Pollefeys (ETH).

Press / Media

Service

Program Committee

 

Tutorials / Workshops

 

PhD Defence Committee

Name (Dr.)AffiliationDateNote
Enric CoronaPhD defense at UPC (Barcelona)16/11/2023External committee member
Yahui ZhangPhD defense at UvA (Amsterdam)20/12/2022Internal committee member
Vasileios ChoutasPhD defense at ETH (Zurich)02/12/2022I co-advised this thesis with M. J. Black at MPI-IS

 

Reviewer

NameConference / JournalYear(s)
CVPRConference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition2016, 2019, 2020*, 2021*, 2023*
ICCVInternational Conference on Computer Vision2019*, 2021
ECCVEuropean Conference on Computer Vision2020
IJCVTransactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence2022-23
TPAMITransactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence2016-17, 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

Team

PhD candidates

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Georgios Paschalidis

01/2024 - now @ UvA

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Dimitrije Antić

03/2023 - now @ UvA

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Sai Kumar Dwivedi

05/2021 - now @ MPI-IS

Co-advising with M. J. Black

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Yuliang Xiu

11/2020 - now @ MPI-IS

Co-advising with M. J. Black
Interned as PhD: Ubisoft, Meta (soon)
Soon: Assist. Prof. @ Westlake University

PhD alumni

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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

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Vasileios Choutas

05/2018 - 12/2022 @ MPI-IS

Co-advising with M. J. Black
Interned as PhD: Microsoft, Meta
Next: Research Scientist @ Google

Long-term PhD collaborators

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Lixin Xue

08/2024 - now @ ETH

PhD of O. Hilliges at ETH
I act as official secondary advisor

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Shashank Tripathi

10/2021 - now @ MPI-IS

PhD of M. J. Black
During our collaboration:
- PhD Scholar @ Meta
- Intern @ EPIC

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Mohamed Hassan

01/2018 - 06/2020 @ MPI-IS

PhD of M. J. Black @ MPI-IS
After our collab: Intern @ Adobe

PhD interns

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Yixin Chen

06/2022 - 12/2022 @ MPI-IS (remotely)

PhD of Song-Chun Zhu @ UCLA

Students (MSc/BSc)

#MSc theses:
Rick AkkermanUvA11/2023-Co-advised with V. F. Abrevaya, H. Feng.Interaction-aware video synthesis
Alex LabroUvA11/2023 -Co-advised with G. Paschalidis.4D grasp synthesis
Romana WilschutUvA11/2022 - 08/2023Next: Intern at 3DUniversum
David HoffmannMPI04/2018 - 01/2020Co-advised with Siyu Tang.Next: PhD @ Uni-Freiburg/Bosch.
#BSc theses:————————–——————————————————–
Benjamin van AltenaUvA04/2023 - 07/2023Co-advised with Dimitrije Antić
Roan van BlankenUvA04/2023 - 07/2023Co-advised with Dimitrije AntićNext: MSc in AI @ UvA
For preprints (arXiv) please see right above.

Contact