Speakers

Taras Kucherenko Research Scientist, Electronic Arts (EA)

Taras Kucherenko is a Research Scientist at Electronic Arts (EA). He finished his PhD at KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, researching machine learning models for non-verbal behavior generation, such as hand gestures and facial expressions. He is a founding organiser of GENEA events and his work on gesture generation has won the best paper award at ICMI 2020.

Cigdem Beyan Associate Professor, Department of Computer Science at the University of Verona

Cigdem Beyan holds the position of Associate Professor at the Department of Computer Science at the University of Verona, Italy. Her research interests are mainly in the areas of computer vision, machine learning, social signal processing, affective computing, and human/animal behaviour analysis. Cigdem has co-authored more than 60 peer-reviewed scientific articles and she regularly publishes in top-tier journals and conferences in computer vision, multimedia and social/affective computing. She is a reviewer of several multimedia, affective computing, computer vision and machine learning journals (e.g., IEEE Trans. PAMI, IEEE Trans. Multimedia; IEEE Trans. Affective Computing, Pattern Recognition), and IEEE/ACM/IAPR/BMVA conferences (e.g., CVPR, ECCV, ICML, WACV, ACM MM, BMVC, ACM ICMI, ICLR). She is a member of IEEE, ACM and ELLIS. Additionally, she has been actively involved in organizing conferences in the fields of Computer Vision, Social Robotics, Human-Computer Interaction, and Biometrics. She is an Associate Fellow of the Higher Education Academy in recognition of attainment against the UK Professional Standards Framework for teaching and learning support in higher education since 2014.

Gül Varol Permanent Researcher, IMAGINE team at Ecole des Ponts ParisTech

Gül Varol is a permanent researcher in the IMAGINE team at Ecole des Ponts ParisTech. Previously, she was a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Oxford (VGG). She obtained her PhD from the WILLOW team of Inria Paris and Ecole Normale Superieure (ENS). Her thesis received PhD awards from ELLIS and AFRIF. She regularly serves as an Area Chair at major computer vision conferences, and is serving as a Program Chair at ECCV'24. Her research interests cover vision and language applications, including video representation learning, human motion synthesis, and sign languages.