Prof. Otmar Hilliges

Research Area: Computer Vision

Otmar Hilliges is an Associate Professor of computer science at ETH Zurich, where he leads the AIT lab and serves as head of the Institute for Intelligent Interactive Systems. Otmar Hilliges’ research lies at the intersection of machine learning and computer vision. He focuses on machine perception of human activity. He is interested in spatio-temporal understanding of how humans move in and interact with the physical world. He develops algorithms, methods and representations for human- and interaction-centric understanding of the world from videos, images and other sensor data. Prior to joining ETH, he was a Researcher at Microsoft Research Cambridge (2012-2013). His Diplom (equiv. MSc) in Computer Science is from Technische Universität München, Germany (2004) and his PhD in Computer Science from LMU München, Germany (2009). He spent two years as a postdoc at Microsoft Research Cambridge (2010-2012). He has published more than 100 peer-reviewed papers in the major venues on computer vision, HCI and computer graphics. His work has been recognized by multiple best paper awards and lasting impact awards at ACM UIST and IEEE ISMAR. 20+ patents have been filed in his name on a variety of subjects from surface reconstruction to AR/VR. He is a Max Planck Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems, Tübingen, an ELLIS Fellow and a core member of the ETH AI center.  Amongst other sources of funding, Otmar Hilliges is a recipient of the prestigious ERC starting grant (2017) and ERC consolidator grant (2022). Otmar Hilliges served as general chair of ISMAR 2018 and regularly serves as Area Chair for the top computer vision conferences (CVPR, ICCV, ECCV).