Olga Sorkine-Hornung
ETH Zurich
Olga Sorkine-Hornung is a Full Professor of Computer Science at ETH Zurich, Switzerland, where she leads the Interactive Geometry Lab at the Institute of Visual Computing. Prior to joining ETH, she was an Assistant Professor at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, New York University (2008-2011). She earned her BSc in Mathematics and Computer Science and PhD in Computer Science from Tel Aviv University (2000, 2006). Following her studies, she received the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation Fellowship and spent two years as a postdoc at the Technical University of Berlin. Her primary research interests lie in computer graphics, geometry processing, shape representation and modeling and discrete differential geometry. She has published over 170 peer reviewed articles in top computer science venues. Olga has served as a member of the ACM Turing Award Committee, including serving as the committee chair for 2020. She received several scientific prizes and awards, including the ERC Starting and Consolidator grants. She is a Fellow of the ACM and the Eurographics Association and a member of the Swiss Academy of Engineering Sciences (SATW).
William T. Freeman
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
William T. Freeman is the Thomas and Gerd Perkins Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) at MIT, and a member of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) there. He was the Associate Department Head of EECS from 2011 – 2014. Since 2015, he has also been a research manager in Google Research in Cambridge, MA.
His current research interests include mid-level vision and computational photography. Previous research topics include steerable filters and pyramids, orientation histograms, the generic viewpoint assumption, color constancy, computer vision for computer games, motion magnification, and belief propagation in networks with loops. He received outstanding paper awards at computer vision or machine learning conferences in 1997, 2006, 2009, 2012 and 2019, and test-of-time awards for papers from 1990, 1995, 2002, 2005, and 2012. He shared the 2020 Breakthrough Prize in Physics for a consulting role with the Event Horizon Telescope collaboration, which reconstructed the first image of a black hole. He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, and a Fellow of the IEEE, ACM, and AAAI. In 2019, he received the PAMI Distinguished Researcher Award, the highest award in computer vision. He is co-author of the computer vision textbook, https://visionbook.mit.edu, also available through MIT Press.
Matthias Nießner
Technical University of Munich
Dr. Matthias Nießner is a Professor at the Technical University of Munich, where he leads the Visual Computing & AI Lab. Before, he was a Visiting Assistant Professor at Stanford University. Prof. Nießner’s research lies at the intersection of computer vision, graphics, and machine learning, where he is particularly interested in cutting-edge techniques for 3D generative AI, AI-driven video synthesis, spatial AI, and photorealistic AI Avatars. In total, he has published over 300 academic publications, including 102 works at the leading vision conferences (CVPR, ECCV, ICCV) as well as 34 works at the premier venues in computer graphics (SIGGRAPH / SIGGRAPH Asia / ToG); several of these works won best paper awards, including at SIGCHI’14, HPG’15, SPG’18, and the SIGGRAPH’16 Emerging Technologies Award for the best Live Demo. Prof. Nießner’s work enjoys wide media coverage, with many articles featured in main-stream media including the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Spiegel, MIT Technological Review, and many more, and his was work led to several TV appearances such as on Jimmy Kimmel Live, where Prof. Nießner demonstrated the popular Face2Face technique; Prof. Nießner’s academic Youtube channel currently has over 5 million views and on Twitter over 40,000 people follow him.
For his work, Prof. Nießner received several awards: he is a TUM-IAS Rudolph Moessbauer Fellow (2017 – ongoing), he won the Google Faculty Award for Machine Perception (2017), the Nvidia Professor Partnership Award (2018), as well as the prestigious ERC Starting Grant 2018 which comes with 1.5 million Euro in research funding; in 2019, he received the Eurographics Young Researcher Award honoring the best upcoming graphics researcher in Europe, and in 2025 he was awarded the ERC Consolidator Grant which comes with 2.75 million Euro in funding. In addition to his academic impact, Prof. Nießner is a co-founder of Synthesia Inc., a unicorn startup dedicated to democratize synthetic media generation with cutting-edge AI-driven video synthesis technology. Most recently, Prof. Nießner is co-founder and CEO of SpAItial AI, a brand-new venture that is at the forefront of generative AI and Spatial Foundation Models. Spaitial is bridging the gap between the digital and physical world with a new paradigm of world models.
Aaron Hertzmann
Adobe Research
Aaron Hertzmann is a Principal Scientist at Adobe Research and Affiliate Faculty at the University of Washington. He received a bachelor’s degree in Computer Science and Art at Rice University and a PhD degree in Computer Science from New York University. He was previously a Professor of Computer Science at the University of Toronto for ten years. He has published over 125 papers in computer graphics, the science of art, and AI. He is an IEEE Fellow, an ACM Fellow, and winner of the 2024 SIGGRAPH Computer Graphics Achievement Award. His research led to a Technical Emmy Award won by Adobe in 2025.