I’m the CEO of Pinscreen, a Los Angeles-based startup that builds the world’s most advanced AI-driven virtual avatars, as well as an Associate Professor of Computer Vision (tenured) at the Mohamed Bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence (MBZUAI), in Abu Dhabi (UAE). Before that, I was a Distinguished Fellow at the University of California, Berkeley, an Associate Professor (tenured) at the Computer Science Department of the University of Southern California (USC), as well as the director of the Vision and Graphics Lab of the USC Institute for Creative Technologies. Here is my official song! Prior to being a faculty, I was a research lead at Industrial Light & Magic (ILM) where I developed the next generation real-time performance capture technology for visual effects and before I joined the force, I spent an exciting year as a postdoc at Columbia and Princeton Universities. I worked on geometric capture of human performances with Eitan Grinspun and Szymon Rusinkiewicz who helped me bridge the gap between data capture and physical simulation. Right after obtaining my PhD from ETH Zurich, I spent a few months at EPFL, visiting my PhD advisor Mark Pauly. During grad school, I spent a wonderful summer at ILM and another one at Stanford University visiting Leo Guibas. I got my Master’s degree in CS from the University of Karlsruhe in Germany and went to a French high school in a boonie town called Saarbrücken.

virtual avatars - human digitization - facial animation - hair modeling - 3D scanning - performance capture - non-rigid registration - motion synthesis - geometry processing - virtual and augmented reality - metaverse - neural rendering - NeRF - deepfakes - deep learning - AI

CEO & Co-Founder Pinscreen, Inc.