Professor Ira Kemelmacher-Shlizerman of the Allen School’s Graphics & Imaging Laboratory (GRAIL) flies her geek flag high in this week’s edition of GeekWire’s “Geek of the Week.” Kemelmacher-Shlizerman is one of the brains behind a series of high-profile research projects that combine facial recognition, modeling and 3-D reconstruction — including a new technique to create photorealistic videos of people from audio files, as demonstrated by a lip-syncing Obama.
The goal of her work, Kemelmacher-Schlizerman explains to GeekWire, is to transform how we interact with one another and the world around us through advancements in computer vision, computer graphics, and augmented and virtual reality technologies.
“Our photos and videos tell a ton of about ourselves, our histories, how people grow, age, learn to walk, and change over time,” she said. “Exploring and learning from that data will enable magical applications in telepresence, health, sports, entertainment and many other unexpected ones.”
Read the full article here, and also check out recent Allen School “Geeks of the Week” Shyam Gollakota, director of the Networks & Mobile Systems Lab, and Ph.D. alumna Irene Zhang.