On July 10th, 2020, Mr Jason Rambach successfully defended his PhD thesis entitled “Learning Priors for Augmented Reality Tracking and Scene Understanding” in front of the examination commission consisting of Prof. Dr. Didier Stricker (TU Kaiserslautern and DFKI), Prof. Dr. Guillaume Moreau (Ecole Centrale de Nantes) and Prof. Dr. Christoph Grimm (TU Kaiserslautern).

In his thesis, Jason Rambach addressed the combination of geometry-based computer vision techniques with machine learning in order to advance the state-of-the-art in tracking and mapping systems for Augmented Reality. His scientific contributions, in the fields of model-based object tracking and SLAM were published in high-rank international peer-reviewed conferences and journals such as IEEE ISMAR and MDPI Computers. His “Augmented Things” paper, proposing the concept of IoT objects that can store and share their AR information received the best poster paper award at the ISMAR 2017 conference.

Jason Rambach holds a Diploma in Computer Engineering from the University of Patras, Greece and a M.Sc. in Information and Communication Engineering from the TU Darmstadt, Germany. Since 2015, he has been at the Augmented Vision group of DFKI where he was responsible for the BMBF-funded research projects ProWiLan and BeGreifen and several industry projects with leading Automotive Companies in Germany. Jason Rambach will remain at DFKI AV as a Team Leader for the newly formed team “Spatial Sensing and Machine Perception” focused on depth sensing devices and scene understanding using Machine Learning.