February 2025

Three EU projects coordinated by the AV department have been presented in a meeting of the Virtual and Augmented Reality Industrial Coalition, hosted by the European Commission in Brussels on February 11^th and 12^th 2025. The meeting brought together over 110 attendees from more than 80 private and public organisations for discussions about the creation of a Private Public Partnership on Virtual Worlds.

The Augmented Vision department presented its work on extended reality (XR) in the projects CORTEX² (Coordinator: Alain Pagani), LUMINOUS (Coordinator:  Zeshan Afzal) and SHARESPACE (Coordinator: Didier Stricker), and participated intensively to the discussions about the Strategic Research and Innovation Agenda (SRIA) of the future Virtual Worlds Partnership.

The topics covered immersion & visualization, intuitive real-time user interaction, standardisation & interoperability, digital twins and XR use cases such as logistics & industry, healthcare, culture media & arts or education.

The department Augmented Vision will continue to represent DFKI in the future partnership on Virtual Worlds with eXtended Reality as key enabling technology.

More information: https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/news/virtual-and-augmented-reality-industrial-coalition-remains-committed-solving-real-world-problems

Contact: Alain Pagani, Zeshan Afzal, Didier Stricker

On December 19th, 2024, Jilliam Díaz Barros successfully defended her doctoral thesis entitled ‘Optimization and Generative Models for Face Analysis’. The PhD thesis was carried out in the Augmented Vision department at DFKI, led by Prof. Dr. Didier Stricker, as part of the Computer Science department at RPTU.

The PhD examination commission consisted of Prof. Dr. Didier Stricker (RPTU) and Prof. Dr. Luís Gonzaga Mendes Magalhães (University of Minho) and was chaired by Prof. Dr. Annette Bieniusa (RPTU).

In her thesis, Jilliam Díaz investigated the modelling of the rigid and non-rigid motions of the head, targeting existing challenges in assistance tools and assistive technologies. The PhD thesis focused on four main areas of contributions: head pose estimation, performance-driven facial animation, facial landmark detection and tracking, and face and upper body image synthesis.

Jilliam Díaz received her Bachelor degree in Electronics Engineering from Universidad del Norte, Colombia and her M.Sc. in Computer Science and Electronics from the Université de Bourgogne, France. Besides being part of the Augmented Vision department, Ms. Díaz Barros has been working as software engineer at ANNA Healthcare Saarland UG.

The Network of Excellence dAIEDGE organized two successful workshops at the High Performance Embedded Architectures and Compilers Conference HiPEAC in Barcelona, Spain on January 20-22, 2024.

The workshop “Excellence in AI and Edge Computing” held on Monday, 20 January, was  dedicated to exploring the frontiers of the AI and edge computing synergy, focusing on the development of scalable and robust AI systems. It opened with a keynote by Dr. Alireza Dehghani from the Irish National Centre for Applied AI CeADAR, followed by the presentation of 15 scientific papers and a demo session. The workshop closed with a matchmaking session about “Industrial investment priorities for successful AI at the Edge in Europe”.

The workshop “Charting the Future of Edge AI: Functional and Non-Functional Requirements in the Age of Generative AI” held on Tuesday, 21 January, was organized by Ovidiu Vermesan (SINTEF) and Alain Pagani (DFKI). It provided a comprehensive platform for stakeholders to exchange ideas, share experiences, and collaborate on advancing edge AI technologies, with a special focus on addressing functional and non-functional requirements defined based on system engineering principles. The three sessions covered “Requirements in the Generative AI Era”, “Technology developments” and “Application developments” with presentations, followed by a panel discussion on Edge AI Future Trends.

Coordinator: Dr. Alain Pagani

Project Manager : Dr. Mohamed Selim