Biography
I am an Assistant Professor at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki (AUTh), ECE department.
I lead the “3Dim Intelligence” (3DI) research team. Our research is currently supported by an ERC Starting Grant, an ELLIS-Amsterdam grant, an NVIDIA Academic Grant, and a Google Gift. I am an ELLIS Scholar.
HIRING: I look for new PhDs to start asap at AUTh – application instructions.
Earlier, I was an Assistant Professor (UD1, tenured) for 3D Computer Vision at the University of Amsterdam (UvA), and a Research Scientist at the Perceiving Systems (PS) department at MPI for Intelligent Systems (MPI-IS).
Even earlier, I was a PostDoc at MPI-IS advised by Michael J. 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.
Recent News
Research
3DI Team
PhD candidates
Alvaro Budria
03/2025 - now @ UvA
Lixin Xue
08/2024 - now @ ETH
Co-advising with
M. Pollefeys & O. Hilliges (ETH)
Interns as PhD: Apple
Georgios Paschalidis
01/2024 - now @ UvA
Dimitrije Antić
03/2023 - now @ UvA
(Will) Intern as PhD: NAVER-Europe
Sai Kumar Dwivedi
05/2021 - now @ MPI-IS
Co-advising with M. J. Black
Interned as PhD: Meta
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, CEO @ Ontic Labs
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
Yuliang Xiu
11/2020 - 03/2025 @ MPI-IS
Co-advising with M. J. Black
Interned as PhD: Ubisoft, Meta (soon)
Next: Asst. Prof. @ Westlake University
Next
Long-term PhD collaborators
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
Publications
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%).
Outstanding Area Chair: CVPR 2026.
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).
- 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)
NVidia Academic Grant Program. Hardware, aproximate value $50k.
Google Research Gift ($80k unrestricted). Investement for a GPU cluster node.
HPC (cluster/compute)
Access on JUPITER Booster (EHPC-REG-2025R02-393)
Access on LEONARDO Booster (EHPC-AI-2024A06-077)
Teaching
- The team of my Computer Vision course (50821COV6Y, link1, link2, link3) ranks top-6 in UvA’s Science Faculty and is candidate for an Education Award for the academic year 2025-2026.
Memberships
- ELLIS Scholar in the ELLIS Unit Amsterdam since January 2025.
- ELLIS society member since April 2022. Endorsed by Otmar Hilliges (ETH) & Marc Pollefeys (ETH).
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)’
- CVPR 2025 – Co-organizer – Half-day Workshop – ‘Reconstruction of Human-Object Interactions (RHOBIN)’
- CVPR 2025 – Advisor team – Half-day Workshop – ‘3D Humans Workshop’
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) (5082ITCV6)
- 2024-2025: 163 students from 3 programs (mainly AI).
- 2023-2024: 146 students from 6+ programs (mainly AI).
- 2022-2023: 263 students from 6+ programs (mainly AI & CS). Co-taught with Rein vd Boomgaard.
- Lecturer: “Computer Vision 1” (UvA, MSc, semester 1, period 1)
- 2025-2026: 200 students from 6+ programs (mainly AI).
Contact
- dtziona@ece.auth.gr
- ECE Department, Faculty of Engineering, AUTH, Thessaloniki, 54636
- https://maps.app.goo.gl/KpvQ6xDGRa2fGinFA