Mr. Habtegebrial is a PhD student at the Augmented Vision research department at the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI) and at the same named lab at the Technical University of Kaiserslautern (TUK). He was awarded the Google PhD Fellowship for his exceptional and innovative research in the field of “Machine Perception“. The PhD fellowship is endowed with 80,000 US dollars. Google also provides each of the PhD students with a research mentor.

Professor Didier Stricker, Tewodros’ PhD supervisor and head of the respective research areas at TUK and DFKI on the award for his PhD student: “I am very pleased that Tewodros received a PhD Fellowship from Google. He earned the honor through his outstanding achievements in his research work in Machine Perception and Image Synthesis.”

As part of his PhD studies Mr Habtegebrial has been working on Image-Based Rendering (IBR). Recently, he has worked on a technique that enables Neural Networks to render realistic novel views, given a single 2D semantic map of the scene. The approach has been published together with google and Nvidia at the pemium conference Neurips 2020. In collaboration with researchers at DFKI and Google research, he is working on spherical light-field interpolation and realistic modelling of reflective surfaces in IBR. This enables the implementation of new applications in the field of realistic virtual reality (VR) and telepresence. In addition to his PhD, topic he has co-authored several articles on Optical Character Recognition (OCR) for Amharic language, which is the official language of Ethiopia.

Further information:
https://research.google/outreach/phd-fellowship/recipients/
https://www.dfki.de/en/web/news/google-phd-fellowship
https://www.uni-kl.de/pr-marketing/news/news/tewodros-amberbir-habtegebrial-mit-google-phd-fellowship-ausgezeichnet