Keynotes

Prof. Pablo Artal – Laboratorio de Óptica (LOUM), Universidad de Murcia

Pablo Artal was born in Zaragoza (Spain). After he finished the primary school, he was enrolled as an intern at the “Universidad Laboral” in Huesca to pursue his baccalaureate education. This allowed him to be the first in the family to attend University. He studied Physics at the University of Zaragoza. In 1984, he moved to Madrid with a pre-doctoral fellowship to work at the CSIC Instituto de Optica under the supervision of Javier Santamaria. He was a post-doctoral research fellow, first at Cambridge University and later at the Institut d’Optique in Orsay, France. After his return to Spain, he obtained a permanent researcher position at the Instituto de Optica (CSIC) in Madrid. In 1994 he became the first full Professor of Optics at the University of Murcia, Spain where he founded his “Laboratorio de Optica”, a world-class laboratory built from scratch, attracting students and collaborators from many countries to Murcia, a region without any previous tradition of research in optical technology. Prof. Artal was secretary of the Spanish Optical Society (SEDO) from 1990 to 1994; associated Dean of the University of Murcia Science Faculty from 1994 to 2000 and Director of the Physics Department at Murcia University from 2001 to 2003. From 2004 to 2007 he was in charge of the reviewing grants panel in Physics at the Spanish Ministry of Science in Madrid. Since 2006 is the founding director of the Center for Research in Optics and Nanophysics at Murcia University. He was president of the Academy of Science of the Murcia Region from 2010 to 2015. During his career he often spent periods doing collaborative research in laboratories in Europe, Australia, Latin America and USA. This included two sabbatical years in Rochester (USA) and Sydney (Australia).  

Prof. Lourdes Agapito – Vision and Imaging Science group, University College London (UK)

My research in Computer Vision has consistently focused on the inference of 3D information from the video acquired from a single moving camera. While my early research focused on static scenes, my attention soon turned to the much more challenging problem of estimating the 3D shape of non-rigid objects (Non-Rigid Structure from Motion, NR-SFM) or complex dynamic scenes where an unknown number of objects might be moving, possibly deforming, independently. My research group investigates all theoretical and practical aspects of NRSFM: deformable tracking; dense optical flow estimation and non-rigid video registration; 3D reconstruction of deformable and articulated structure and dense 3D modelling of non-rigid dynamic scenes.

I have held an ERC Starting Grant funded by the European Research Council from 2008-2014. I am a member of the Vision and Imaging Science group and the Centre for Inverse Problems.

More info: http://www0.cs.ucl.ac.uk/staff/L.Agapito/

Carlos A. Vanegas – engineering in Bright Machines

Carlos is Sr. Director for Software Engineering at Bright Machines, where he’s helping build and run the engineering teams that are creating the core technology behind intelligent, software-defined manufacturing. He was a senior software architect of the Forge Data Platform, and he led the design of the data architecture, data models and data management components of the Autodesk cloud platform. Also worked with a team of product architects and product managers to identify common data modeling and data management needs across Autodesk architecture, engineering, construction and manufacturing products, including Revit, AutoCAD, Fusion, Inventor, Civil3D and Infraworks.

Carlos Vanegas was the Chief Technology Officer and a co-founder at Synthicity, where he led the engineering team in the development of software tools for 3D urban planning and design, including UrbanCanvas and GeoCanvas. He was a Postdoctoral Scholar at the University of California, Berkeley, and received his PhD from the Department of Computer Science at Purdue University in 2012. His work was focused on concurrent behavioral and geometric methods for fast design, editing and visualization of 3D urban spaces. Carlos published several peer reviewed papers in top computer graphics journals and conferences and held numerous invited talks at conferences and universities.

During his doctoral studies, Carlos was a Research Assistant at Purdue’s Computer Graphics and Visualization Lab, a visiting researcher at the Chair for Information Architecture at ETH Zürich, and a collaborator in several research projects with the Department of City and Regional Planning at UC Berkeley. He also was an intern software engineer at Procedural Inc. (acquired by Esri in 2011), where he participated in the development of CityEngine. Carlos obtained his B.S. degree in Applied Mathematics from EAFIT University (Colombia) in 2007.