FAA

Catherine Pelachaud (CNRS, LTCI, TELECOM ParisTech, France)

Catherine Pelachaud is Director of Research at CNRS in the laboratory LTCI, TELECOM ParisTech. She received her PhD in Computer Graphics at the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, USA in 1991. She participated to the elaboration of the first embodied conversation agent system, GestureJack, with Justine Cassell, Norman Badler and Mark Steedman when being a post-doctorate at the University of Pennsylvania. Her research interest includes representation language for agent, embodied conversational agent, nonverbal communication (face, gaze, and gesture), expressive behaviors and multimodal interfaces. She has been involved and is still involved in several European projects related to multimodal communication (EAGLES, IST-ISLE), to believable embodied conversational agents (IST-MagiCster, FP5 PF-STAR), emotion (FP5 NoE Humaine, FP6 IP CALLAS, FP7 STREP SEMAINE) and social behaviors (FP7 NoE SSPNet).

Bernd Bickel (Disney Research, ETH Zürich, Switzerland)

Bernd Bickel is currently a research scientist at Disney Research Zurich. His research interests include computer graphics and computer vision. In particular, he focuses on face and human modeling, including next generation 3D surface scanner devices, performance capture, measuring and modeling the deformation behavior of soft tissue, and animation tools. Bernd recieved a M.Sc. in Computer Science in 2006 and spent nine months at Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories under the supervision of Prof. Hanspeter Pfister. He is writing his PhD thesis at ETH Zurich in the Computer Graphics Lab headed by Prof. Markus Gross and is expected to defend in 2010.