Otmar Hilliges

Biography

Otmar Hilliges is from Munich, Germany where I was born and raised. Currently I'm an Assistant Professor of Computer Science (tenure-track) at ETH Zurich. I lead the AIT lab affiliated with the Institute of Pervasive Computing and the Institute of Visual Computing. Prior to joining ETH I was Researcher at Microsoft Research Cambridge, in the I3D group(2010-2013). I was awarded a Diplom (equiv. MSc) in Computer Science from Technische Universität München, Germany (Summa Cum Laude 2004) and my PhD in Computer Science from LMU München, Germany (Summa Cum Laude 2009). Following my studies, I spent two years as a postdoc at Microsoft Research Cambridge (2010-2012).

Research Interest

Otmar Hilliges research interests are centered around the computational aspects of Human-Computer-Interaction (HCI). As technologies shift computing away from the desktop, it is becoming increasingly clear that traditional means of interaction need to be replaced or complemented with new forms of input and output. My main objective is to push the boundaries of what humans can do with computers and how they interact with them. Concretely, I am interested in machine perception of human activity, including pose estimation, gesture recognition and other forms of input sensing. Furthermore, I am interested in algorithms that can extract high-level concepts such as style and semantic meaning from observations of human activities and algorithms that continously update individualised user models (based on such data). Finally, we investigate how mathematical optimization techniques can be used to synthesize and optimize user interfaces, at design- and run-time. For example, finding optimal parametrizations of sensor-based interactive devices for a given input task or finding optimized ways to display information given the systems current best believe about the user's intention, attention and other states. I'm interested in many different application domains such as Augmented and Virtual Reality, Human Robot Interaction and Smart Environments and more. We work in diverse areas including HCI, robotics, computer vision and computer graphics as well as in applied machine learning and numerical optimization.