Matthias Nießner (born 1986) is a German

computer scientist A computer scientist is a scientist who specializes in the academic study of computer science. Computer scientists typically work on the theoretical side of computation. Although computer scientists can also focus their work and research on ...

, academic, and entrepreneur working in the fields of

computer graphics Computer graphics deals with generating images and art with the aid of computers. Computer graphics is a core technology in digital photography, film, video games, digital art, cell phone and computer displays, and many specialized applications. ...

and

computer vision Computer vision tasks include methods for image sensor, acquiring, Image processing, processing, Image analysis, analyzing, and understanding digital images, and extraction of high-dimensional data from the real world in order to produce numerical ...

. He is a professor of Computer Science at the

Technical University of Munich The Technical University of Munich (TUM or TU Munich; ) is a public research university in Munich, Bavaria, Germany. It specializes in engineering, technology, medicine, and applied and natural sciences. Established in 1868 by King Ludwig II ...

and leads the Visual Computing Lab. As a member of the Max Planck Center for Visual Computing and Communication Junior Research Group Program, he was a Visiting Assistant Professor at

Stanford University Leland Stanford Junior University, commonly referred to as Stanford University, is a Private university, private research university in Stanford, California, United States. It was founded in 1885 by railroad magnate Leland Stanford (the eighth ...

, working in the lab of Pat Hanrahan.

Education

Nießner received a Ph.D. in

from the

University of Erlangen-Nuremberg A university () is an institution of tertiary education and research which awards academic degrees in several academic disciplines. ''University'' is derived from the Latin phrase , which roughly means "community of teachers and scholars". Univ ...

in 2013 and received his Diploma degree in 2010. His thesis on the topic of ''Subdivision Surface Rendering using Hardware Tessellation'' was submitted in 2013 and was awarded the highest honors. Some ideas from this thesis were used in the most recent version of

Pixar Pixar (), doing business as Pixar Animation Studios, is an American animation studio based in Emeryville, California, known for its critically and commercially successful computer-animated feature films. Pixar is a subsidiary of Walt Disney ...

's OpenSubdiv, which also incorporates ideas dating back to 1996 from

Edwin Catmull Edwin Earl Catmull (born March 31, 1945) is an American computer scientist and animator who served as the co-founder of Pixar and the President of Walt Disney Animation Studios. He has been honored for his contributions to 3D computer graphics, ...

, Tony DeRose, Michael Kass, Charles Loop, and Peter Schröder.

Career

Through a junior research group program, Nießner was a Visiting Assistant Professor from 2013 to 2017 at

in the lab of Pat Hanrahan. Since 2017, he has been a professor at the Technical University of Munich, where he heads the Visual Computing Lab. Nießner's work focuses on

3D reconstruction In computer vision and computer graphics, 3D reconstruction is the process of capturing the shape and appearance of real objects. This process can be accomplished either by active or passive methods. If the model is allowed to change its shape i ...

and semantic scene understanding. Among his best-known work is that on facial reenactment, which has been widely criticized for contributing to the ease with which

fake news Fake news or information disorder is false or misleading information (misinformation, disinformation, propaganda, and hoaxes) claiming the aesthetics and legitimacy of news. Fake news often has the aim of damaging the reputation of a person ...

can be generated. The majority of the external stake in his company Synthesia comes from speculative American businessman

Mark Cuban Mark Cuban (born July 31, 1958) is an American businessman and television personality. He is the former principal owner and current minority owner of the Dallas Mavericks of the National Basketball Association (NBA) and co-owner of 2929 Entertain ...

. He developed with his colleagues ''Face2Face'', which was the first work to manipulate facial expressions from consumer cameras in real time. More recently, he has been working on 3D semantic scene understanding, developing with his colleagues ScanNet, the first large-scale, densely-annotated 3D dataset. Nießner was awarded a Google Faculty Research Award in 2017 for Photo-realistic Avatars from Videos: Free Viewpoint Animation of Human Faces, as well as a Rudolf Mössbauer Fellowship from the Technical University of Munich.
from fellows roster at Technical University of Munich, retrieved 2018-05-09.

References

External links

Matthias Nießner's Home PageMatthias Nießner
at

DBLP DBLP is a computer science bibliography website. Starting in 1993 at Universität Trier in Germany, it grew from a small collection of HTML files and became an organization hosting a database and logic programming bibliography site. Since Novem ...

Bibliography Server {{DEFAULTSORT:Niessner, Matthias German computer scientists Living people University of Erlangen–Nuremberg alumni Academic staff of the Technical University of Munich 1986 births