Biography
Prof. Dr. Aljosa Smolic is lecturer in AR/VR at HSLU since 2022. Since September 2023 he is Co-Head of the Immersive Realities Research Lab. Before joining HSLU, he was SFI Research Professor of Creative Technologies at Trinity College Dublin (TCD, 2016-2021), where he was heading the research group V-SENSE, on visual computing, combining computer vision, computer graphics and media technology, to extend the dimensions of visual sensation. His research interests include immersive technologies such as AR, VR, volumetric video, 360/omni-directional video, light-fields, and VFX/animation, with a special focus on deep learning in visual computing. Before joining TCD, Dr. Smolic was with Disney Research Zurich as Senior Research Scientist and Head of the Advanced Video Technology group (2009-2016), and with the Fraunhofer Heinrich-Hertz-Institut (HHI), Berlin, also heading a research group as Scientific Project Manager (2001-2009). At Disney Research he led over 50 R&D projects in the area of visual computing that have resulted in numerous publications and patents, as well as technology transfers to a range of Disney business units. He received his PhD from Aachen University of Technology (RWTH) in 2001 and was lecturer at the Technical University of Berlin (2003-2009) and ETH Zurich (2009-2016).
Dr. Smolic served as Associate Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Image Processing and the Signal Processing: Image Communication journal. He was Guest Editor for the Proceedings of the IEEE, IEEE Transactions on CSVT, IEEE Signal Processing Magazine, and other scientific journals. Dr. Smolic is also co-founder of the start-up company Volograms, which commercialises volumetric video content creation. He received the IEEE ICME Star Innovator Award 2020 for his contributions to volumetric video content creation, TCD's Campus Company Founders Award 2020, as well as several best paper awards.
