Dear colleagues,
the new Visual Computing and Artificial Intelligence Department at the Max-Planck-Institute for Informatics (https://www.mpi-inf.mpg.de/departments/visual-computing-and-artificial-intelligence) has an opening for a research group leader. The new department is headed by Prof. Christian Theobalt who is a new Scientific Director at the MPI for Informatics.
The Visual Computing and Artificial Intelligence Department investigates foundational research problems in Computer Graphics, Computer Vision and Artificial Intelligence. It is our long term vision to develop entirely new ways to capture, represent, synthesize and simulate models of the real world at highest detail, robustness, and efficiency. To achieve this long term goal, we develop new concepts that rethink and unite established approaches from Computer Graphics and Computer Vision with concepts from Artificial Intelligence, in particular Machine Learning. In the past, Prof. Theobalt and his team made widely recognized contributions to visual computing, notably in the area of virtual humans and neural rendering, some of which also received broader attention beyond the scientific community. Example works are VNect, Face2Face, Deep Video Portraits, DeepCap, Neural Sparse Voxel Fields and recently Deep Dynamic Characters.
The department’s work will lay the foundations for a new way of thinking about computer graphics, and for new ways of uniting and enriching the real world with computer graphics technology. It also lays the foundations for advanced methods to better perceive, understand and interpret the complex real world in motion surrounding us from visual observation, which is an essential capability of future interacton modalities, as well as of intelligent computing systems that safely and intuitively interact with humans and the human world.
The department performs foundational research in the following areas and is seeking applications from candidates in these areas
· Virtual Humans
· Neural Representations
· Inverse Rendering
· Rendering and Neural Rendering
· Deep Learning for Visual Computing
· AI for Graphics and Vision
· Language Guided Graphics and Vision
· Knowledge Representation for Visual Computing
· Visual Scene Understanding
· 3D and 4D Reconstruction
· Multi-modal Reconstruction and Synthesis
· Free-viewpoint and 3D Video
· Marker-less Motion and Performance Capture
· 3D Image Analysis and Synthesis
· Inverse Rendering
· Computer Animation
· Geometric Modeling
· Virtual and Augmented Reality
· New Sensors for Visual Computing
· Physically-based and Image-based Rendering
· New Methods for Human-Compter Interaction
The department provides a unique, inspiring and highly collaborative research environment. It features unique large scale experimental facilities in visual computing for real world data acquisition, such as diverse scanner hardware, and several large-scale multi-camera and capture systems for humans and general objects and scenes. The department also has access to excellent computing infrastructure with access to multiple large scale GPU and CPU clusters.
Research Group Leaders pursue an independent research agenda with their own small team. Funding for the group leader, personnel and equipment is provided. Applicants for a research group leader position should have an outstanding PhD in computer science or a related field and have conducted research in one of the research areas listed above. Further, group leader applicants typically have experience as a researcher on a postdoctoral level. Applicants should have an excellent track record of publications in the top tier conferences and journals in computer graphics (EUROGRAPIHCS, SIGGRAPH, SIGGRAPH Asia, ACM TOG etc.), computer vision (CVPR, ICCV, ECCV, TPAMI etc.), or machine learning (NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR etc.). The application package should contain a CV, a statement of research describing the research vision of the group, transcripts and the contacts of at least three academic references.
Please send your complete application package to via Email to d6-applications@mpi-inf.mpg.de. For questions regarding these positions please directly email Christian Theobalt: theobalt@mpi-inf.mpg.de.
The Max Planck Society seeks to increase the number of women in those areas where they are underrepresented andt herefore explicitly encourages women to apply. The Max Planck Society is further committed to employing more individuals with handicaps and particularly encourages these to apply.
About the environment
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The Max-Planck Institute for Informatics (MPI-INF) (www.mpi-inf.mpg.de) is one of the world's leading research institutes in Computer Science in general, and Visual Computing in particular. It is located on the campus of Saarland University in Saarbruecken, Germany. MPI-INF is embedded in a unique cluster of computer science research. Around 400 PhD students in CS do research in the different CS institutes on campus under the roof of a joint CS graduate school.
The immediate neighborhood on campus is home to other computer science research institutes of world renown with which close collaborations exist: the Computer Science Department of Saarland University, the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI), the Max-Planck-Institute for Software Systems, the Institute for Bioinformatics, and the new Helmholtz research center on IT Security, Privacy and Accountability (CISPA). The Leibniz Center for Informatics in Schloss Dagstuhl is also located nearby. (www.informatik-saarland.de)
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Prof. Dr. Christian Theobalt
Scientific Director
Visual Computing and Artificial Intelligence Department