Computer Science Distinguished Lecture

Sanja Fidler

University of Toronto, NVIDIA

Abstract:
3D content is key in several domains such as architecture, film, gaming, robotics, and lies in the heart of the metaverse applications. However, creating 3D content can be very time consuming -- the artists need to sculpt high quality 3d assets, compose them into large worlds, and bring these worlds to life by writing behaviour models that "drive" the characters around in the world. For applications such as metaverse which feature extremely large 3D virtual worlds, A.I. that can help automate, scale up and democratize 3D content creation is existential. In this talk, I'll present some of the ongoing efforts on A.I. for creating virtual worlds.

Bio:
Sanja Fidler is an Associate Professor at the University of Toronto, affiliated faculty at the Vector Institute (and one of the co-founding members), and VP of AI Research at NVIDIA, leading a research lab in Toronto. Prior to coming to Toronto, in 2014, she was a Research Assistant Professor at Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago, an academic institute located in the campus of University of Chicago. Her work is in the area of Computer Vision and Machine Learning. She received the NVIDIA Pioneer of AI award, Amazon Academic Research Award, Facebook Faculty Award, and the Connaught New Researcher Award. In 2018 she was appointed as the Canadian CIFAR AI Chair. Her work on semi-automatic object instance annotation won the Best Paper Honorable Mention at CVPR-17. Her main research interests are in the intersection of computer vision and graphics, 3D vision, 3D reconstruction and synthesis; and interactive methods for image annotation.