Seminar on Digital Humans
Overview
This seminar covers advanced topics in digital humans with a focus on the latest research results. Topics include estimating human pose and motion from images, human motion synthesis, learning-based human avatar creation, learning neural implicit representations for humans, modeling, animations, artificial intelligence for digital characters, and others. A collection of research papers is selected.
Objectives
The goal is to get an overview of actual research topics in the field of digital humans and to improve presentation and critical analysis skills.
Format
This seminar covers advanced topics in digital humans including both seminal research papers as well as the latest research results. A collection of research papers are selected covering topics such as estimating human pose and motion from images, human motion synthesis, learning-based human avatar creation, learning neural implicit representations for humans, modeling, animations, artificial intelligence for digital characters, and others. Each student presents one paper to the class and leads a discussion about the paper. All students read the papers and participate in the discussion.
Details
| Level | Graduate (MSc / PhD) |
| Semester | Fall |
| Institution | ETH Zurich, D-INFK |
| Role | Course creator & lecturer |
| Years | 2022 – present |
I am a Senior Researcher & Lecturer at the Computer Graphics Laboratory of ETH Zurich, and a Research Consultant at Disney Research. I am leading the Digital Character AI projects at CGL. My research interests include conversational digital characters, affective computing, human-computer interaction, and applied machine learning.
My vision is to create intelligent digital humans that can naturally communicate, understand, and support people across domains such as education and mental health. My research focuses on multimodal artificial intelligence for interactive digital humans, developing models that combine large language models, affective computing, and data-driven animation to create embodied conversational agents endowed with autonomous agency, consistent values, and beliefs.
My work bridges machine learning, human–computer interaction, and computer graphics to enable AI systems such as Digital Einstein and interactive patient avatars for psychotherapy training and health education.