Prof. Mel Slater
Mel Slater is a Distinguished Investigator at the University of Barcelona in the Institute of Neurosciences, and co-Director of the Event Lab (Experimental Virtual Environments for Neuroscience and Technology). He was previously Professor of Virtual Environments at University College London in the Department of Computer Science. He has been involved in research in virtual reality since the early 1990s, and has been first supervisor of 40 PhDs in graphics and virtual reality since 1989. He held a European Research Council Advanced Grant TRAVERSE 2009-2015 and has now a second Advanced Grant MoTIVE 2018-2023. He is a Research Award Winner of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation in 2021, and was elected to the IEEE VGTC Virtual Reality Academy in 2022. He is Field Editor of Frontiers in Virtual Reality, and Chief Editor of the Human Behaviour in Virtual Reality section. His publications can be seen on: http://publicationslist.org/melslater
Keynote Title: Presence, Body Ownership and Vicarious Agency: Illusions of Virtual Reality
Abstract: Participants in virtual reality typically experience the virtual world as an actual place where they are located with real events happening – even though they know for sure that these are illusions rather than reality. They may even have the experience that their body is the virtual one that they perceive in the virtual reality rather than their real body. Again, even though know this to be an illusion, it still can transform their attitudes and behaviours. In this talk I will present examples of these major illusions, their measurement and applications.
Prof. Marios S. Pattichis
Bio: Marios S. Pattichis is the Gardner Zemke Professor at the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of New Mexico. He has served as a Senior Associate Editor for the IEEE Transactions On Image Processing and a Senior Associate Editor for IEEE Signal Processing Letters, Associate Editor for IEEE Transactions on Image Processing, Pattern Recognition, IEEE Transactions on Industrial Informatics, and a Guest Associate Editor for special issues published in the IEEE Transactions on Information Technology in Biomedicine, IEEE Journal of Biomedical and Health Informatics, Biomedical Signal Processing and Control, and Teachers College Record. He was a recipient of the 2016 Lawton-Ellis and the 2004 Distinguished Teaching Awards from the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at UNM. In 2022 he was elected Fellow of the European Alliance of Medical and Biological Engineering and Science (EAMBES) for his contributions to biomedical image analysis. For more information visit: http://www.ece.unm.edu/faculty-staff/electrical-and-computer/marios-pattichis.html
Keynote Title: Large Scale Video Analysis: A case study in Educational Video Analysis
Abstract: Large-scale video analysis remains extremely challenging despite significant progress in large-scale image analysis. The challenges come from the need to properly define the problems, developing ground-truth on large-scale video datasets, the need for video compression, and the development of efficient methods with training over large datasets. The talk will discuss how these fundamental issues were addressed for analyzing educational videos to support better teaching practices and assess student participation. Unlike the majority of existing video datasets, educational video analysis proved to be particularly challenging due to the need to narrow the focus on what can be achieved, the need to process large videos of over an hour, occlusions, the need to process the audio in noisy classrooms, and to present the results in a meaningful way. The talk will discuss the development of effective video models for video analysis, the integration of computer vision models for bilingual speech recognition, and the development of an interactive WebApp for visualizing the results from human activity recognition.
