The Department of Perceiving Systems regrets to inform you that Daniel Cudeiro passed away on Wednesday December 5, 2018.  For scientific issues please contact Michael Black <black@tue.mpg.de> and for all other issues please contact Melanie Feldhofer <melanie.feldhofer@tuebingen.mpg.de>.

In September 2017, Daniel joined the Max Planck ETH Center for Learning Systems, as a doctoral fellow at the first joint research center of ETH Zurich and the Max Planck Society. His PhD research was jointly supervised by Prof Michael Black from MPI-IS and Prof Luc van Gool from ETHZ. He also worked closely with Dr Timo Bolkart.

His research combined principles from Artificial Intelligence, such as Machine Learning, Natural Language Processing and Computer Vision, with concepts from psychology and computer graphics. He was most interested in understanding human communication in order to improve the state of the art in virtual avatars and human to computer interaction. His first step towards this bigger goal was to develop models of facial animation. The next steps were to understand more abstract forms of human communication such as emotions and intention. Most of his research was data driven, for which he captured humans in 3D using our 4D scanner. His ultimate goal was to understand the building blocks that allow humans to perceive, interact and create. To finally be able to model human's inside out (body, face, mind, motion, ...)  making 3D virtual avatars indistinguishable from real humans. 

From Computer Vision, he was interested in:

• 3D human pose and shape estimation;
• 2D/3D head pose and shape estimation;
• and new tasks arising from zero-shot learning, transfer learning and multimodal learning.

Within Computer Graphics, he was interested in:

• human faces and bodies;
• and human computer interaction.

For what regards Machine Learning, he was interested in:

• transfer learning,
• multimodal learning,
• metalearning,
• zero-shot learning.

Within Natural Language Processing, he was interested in:

• semantic representations,
• language and vision,
• applied psycholinguistic research.

As part of his PhD studies, he investigated ways of combining these topics to discover new and exciting tasks while solving problems and contributing to a better world. Eager to learn, pleased to discover!

Artificial Intelligence Natural Language Processing Computer Vision Transfer Learning Multimodal Learning 3D modelling.