Jack Jansen is a senior researcher at Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica (CWI), with over 25 years of experience in multimedia and distributed systems. Empowering people to put available technology to a use they themselves envision is his driving principle. This results in activities ranging from languages, such as Python, via web standardization work (SMIL, Rich Web Application Backplane) to implementing systems for accessible and reusable multimedia (Ambulant). In the recent past he was the main programmer with Oratrix, a startup that aimed to bring structured multimedia content to the Web. He participated in the EU-funded Vconect project, and since more recently in the H2020 project 2-IMMERSE as the main software architect.

Dr. Irene Viola received her B.Sc. in Cinema and Media Engineering from the Polytechnic University of Turin, Italy, in 2013, which was followed by a M.Sc. degree in Computer Engineering from the Polytechnic University of Turin, Italy, in 2015. In April 2019, she obtained a PhD degree in Electrical Engineering at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL), Switzerland. She is currently working as a postdoctoral researcher in the Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica (CWI) in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. Her research interest include compression, transmission and quality of experience for immersive media.

Shishir Subramanyam is a PhD student at the Distributed and Interactive Systems group of the Dutch national research institute for mathematics and computer science (CWI). He holds a Master of Science degree in Computer Science from TU Delft. During his studies he worked on extending the MPEG anchor codec for point clouds by adding an enhancement layer with interprediction. He worked as a senior business analyst at Mu Sigma Business Solutions for 3 years where he provided data science solutions to multiple Fortune 500 companies. His PhD research aims to explore adaptive streaming of real time volumteric user reconstructions for 6 Degree of Freedom social virtual reality.

Dr. Fons Kuijk is senior researcher at CWI specialized in the area of autonomous conversational agents, 3D graphics, computational geometry,  animation and tele-immersion technology. He is interested in HCI and advocates a human-centered approach aimed to make technology supportive rather than leading. His work on nonconventional architectures and algorithms for 3D graphics formed the basis of his PhD. Fons Kuijk is former CTO of frst Epictoid and later Chartoon software (both in Amsterdam), where he managed research and development of conversational agents and innovative tools for production of animations.

He participates in European projects since 1983. In the last decade these include Passepartout (2005–2007) in which he was responsible for conversational agent technology, TA2 (2008–2012) in which he developed an authoring tool for story telling based on images, and REVERIE (2011-2015) in which he was leading the crucial work package on Interaction and Autonomy needed to create an immersive experience in a virtual environment. He was involved in 2-IMMERSE (2015 – 2018) in which he worked on an authoring tool for temporal and spatial aspects of multimedia content. In VRTogether (started in 2017) his work focusses on capturing and rendering of dynamic pointcloud representations.

Dr. Pablo Cesar leads Distributed and Interactive Systems group at CWI (The National Research Institute for Mathematics and Computer Science in the Netherlands). Pablo‘s research focuses on modeling and controlling complex collections of media objects (including real-time media and sensor data) that are distributed in time and space. Pablo has co-guided five PhD theses about sensing technologies, 3D tele-immersion, accessibility, socially-aware multimedia, and distributed systems; and is currently co-guiding other four about multimedia systems, sensing technology, and QoE. He is the PI from CWI on two H2020 projects about object-based broadcasting (2-IMMERSE) and 3D tele-immersion (VRTogether). Pablo participated as PI as well in very successful EU-funded projects like REVERIE (2011-2015) and Vconect (2011-2014). He has keynoted at venues such as the International Conference on Physiological Computing Systems (2017) and the Workshop on Educational and Knowledge Technologies (2017). Pablo has (co)-authored over 100 articles with several of his publications winning the best paper award: ACM TVX (2018), ACM MMsys (2016 and 2013), the International Conference on Physiological Computing Systems (2016), and WSICC (2013). He is member of the editorial board of, among others, IEEE Multimedia, ACM Transactions on Multimedia and IEEE Transactions of Multimedia. Pablo has given tutorials about multimedia systems in prestigious conferences such as ACM Multimedia, CHI, and the WWW conference. He acted as an invited expert at the European Commission‘s Future Media Internet Architecture Think Tank and participates in standardization activities at MPEG (point-cloud compression) and ITU (QoE for multi-party tele-meetings).

http://homepages.cwi.nl/~garcia/

Dr. Jie Li is a postdoctoral researcher at the Distributed Interactive Systems group of the Dutch National Research Institute for Mathematics and Computer Science (CWI), in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. She holds a Master of Science degree and a PhD degree and in Industrial Design Engineering. She is specialised in conducting research on user experience (UX),  Quality of Experience (QoE) assessment and has good interface design and prototyping skills. She has participated in many cross-discipline projects. In 2011, she worked in Philips Research, where she did research on how retail lighting conditions influence the human perception of apparel textiles. During her PhD, she focused on understanding and improving crowd experiences at festivals, theme parks and public transportations. She tried to bridge the data collected via proximity sensors with the psychological data self-reported by the crowds. As a postdoctoral researcher, she is working as a UX specialist in two projects. One is to design and develop a new production platform for object-based broadcasting (2-IMMERSE) and the other one is to develop metrics for assessing experience in social virtual reality (VRTogether).

Dr. Francesca De Simone is a tenure track researcher at the Distributed & Interactive Systems group of the Dutch National Research Institute for Mathematics and Computer Science (CWI), in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. She received the Ph.D. degree in computer and information science from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL), Lausanne, Switzerland, in 2012. After her Ph.D, she worked as post-doctoral fellow in the Multimedia Signal Processing Group at Institut Mines Telecom ParisTech, France, and as senior engineer in the cybersecurity department of Kudelski Security, Switzerland. Before joining CWI, from November 2015 to January 2018, she was a post-doctoral fellow at the Signal Processing Laboratory LTS4 of EPFL, funded by a research grant from YouTube. She is member of the IEEE MMSP Technical Committee and the Qomex Technical Program Committee. She has been and is part of the organising committee of international conferences and workshops, such as ACM Multimedia Systems (MMsys), the International Workshop on Immersive Mixed and Virtual Environment Systems (MMVE 2019), and the International Workshop on Multimedia Alternate Realities (AltMM). She has authored more than 50 scientific publications and regularly serves as TPC member for international conferences and reviewer for IEEE and Elsevier journals. Her research interests include multimedia quality assessment, human visual perception, image and video compression, and streaming technologies.