Achieving Photoreal Digital Actors in Film and in Real-Time
Dr. Paul Debevec,
USC Institute for Creative Technologies, USA –
Abstract:
Somewhere between “Final Fantasy” and “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button”, digital actors crossed the “Uncanny Valley” from looking strangely synthetic to believably real. This talk describes how the Light Stage scanning systems and HDRI lighting techniques developed at the USC Institute for Creative Technologies have helped create digital actors in a range of recent movies and research projects. In particular, the talk describes how high-resolution face scanning, advanced character rigging, and performance-driven facial animation were combined to create 2008’s “Digital Emily”, a collaboration with Image Metrics (now Faceware) yielding one of the first photoreal digital actors, and 2013’s “Digital Ira”, a collaboration with Activision Inc., yielding the most realistic real-time digital actor to date. The talk includes recent developments in HDRI lighting, polarization difference imaging, and reflectance measurement, and 3D object scanning, and concludes with advances in autostereoscopic 3D displays to enable 3Dis teleconferencing and holographic characters.
Bio
Paul Debevec is a Research Professor at the University of Southern California and the Associate Director of Graphics Research at USC’s Institute for Creative Technologies. From his 1996 P.hD. at UC Berkeley, Debevec’s publications and animations have focused on techniques for photogrammetry, image-based rendering, high dynamic range imaging, image-based lighting, appearance measurement, facial animation, and 3D displays. Debevec serves as the Vice President of ACM SIGGRAPH and received a Scientific and Engineering Academy Award® in 2010 for his work on the Light Stage facial capture systems, used in movies including Spider-Man 2, Superman Returns, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Avatar, Tron: Legacy, The Avengers, and Oblivion.
Host
Joaquim Armando Pires Jorge
Venue:
Instituto Superior Técnico TAGUSPark (Sala 1.38)
Upcoming Events
OLISSIPO Summer School in Lisbon | Computational phylogenetics to analyse the evolution of cells and communities

We are happy to announce the OLISSIPO Summer School on Computational phylogenetics to analyse the evolution of cells and communities, which will be held in Lisbon, Portugal, at INESC-ID, between July 2-7, 2023.
Keynote speakers:
David Posada, University of Vigo (class)
João Alves, University of Vigo (hands-on)
Nadia El-Mabrouk, Université de Montréal (class)
Mattéo Delabre, Université de Montréal (hands-on)
Ran Libeskind-Hadas, Claremont McKenna College (class and hands-on)
Russell Schwartz, Carnegie Mellon University (class and hands-on)
See the preliminary agenda at: https://olissipo.inesc-id.pt/tree-tango-school
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The 13th Lisbon Machine Learning School | LxMLS 2023

The Lisbon Machine Learning Summer School (LxMLS) takes place yearly at Instituto Superior Técnico (IST). LxMLS 2023 will be a 6-day event (14-20 July, 2023), scheduled to take place as an in-person event.
The school covers a range of machine learning topics, from theory to practice, that are important in solving natural language processing problems arising in different application areas. It is organized jointly by Instituto Superior Técnico (IST), a leading Engineering and Science school in Portugal, the Instituto de Telecomunicações, the Instituto de Engenharia de Sistemas e Computadores, Investigação e Desenvolvimento em Lisboa (INESC-ID), the Lisbon ELLIS Unit for Learning and Intelligent Systems (LUMLIS), Unbabel, Zendesk, and IBM Research.
Check online for information about past editions: LxMLS 2011, LxMLS 2012, LxMLS 2013, LxMLS 2014, LxMLS 2015, LxMLS 2016, LxMLS 2017, LxMLS 2018, LxMLS 2019, LxMLS 2020, LxMLS 2021, LxMLS 2022 (you can also watch the videos of the lectures for 2016, 2017, 2018, and 2020).
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The ISD 2023 conference held this year also provides an opportunity for researchers and practitioners to promote their research, practical experience, and to discuss issues related to Information Systems through papers, posters, and journal-first paper presentations.
ISD 2023 will be hosted by Instituto Superior Técnico, in Lisbon, Portugal, on August 30–September 1, 2023.