Biography

After leading a research group at the PhenoRob Cluster of Excellence (University of Bonn) for four years, I left academia to seek new adventures. Why? The short answer is that there was too little time left to focus on solving technical challenges. Add-ons like grant writing, politics or administration took too much time and energy. Spending the next 20 years on a career path where I did not enjoy most of the tasks was not for me. So I pivoted. Moving to Moldova, mainly for personal reasons and curiosity about post-Soviet countries, gives me time to breathe, explore new opportunities in emerging technologies like 3D printing or GenAI, or support my PhD student in the final stage.

I did my Masters in the UK for technical positions in VFX and games, and my curiosity about graphics software led me to a PhD in computer graphics. To better understand why some characters look adorable and others creepy (uncanny valley), I create controlled perceptual experiments and had to develop new algorithms to facilitate them. Technical innovations include facial animation retargeting, texture and shape transfer for stylized characters and creating digital doubles from 3D scans. Winning the Eurographics PhD Award was a great honour.

From there on I moved to technical roles in academia and start-ups in the field of volumetric video and character animation before taking the risk and switching to post-processing of 4D plant data. Unfortunately, the quality of the data at that time turned out to be insuficient. Forced to pivot, we focused on improving the 3D reconstructions of plants. This includes builing entire multi-view systems with consumer and high-end cameras, or developing and publishing new algorithms scaling to high image resolutions.

Simply put, I deeply understand the algorithms behind graphics and computer vision software such as Maya, Photoshop, the Unreal Engine or Reality Capture as well as the artistic workflows in VFX, games and computer animation. I am not afraid to extend similar software in C++ or Python and create 3D assets to showcase the technical benefits of my work. Over the years, I have collaborated with international research groups e.g., from Ireland or South Korea as well as within highly interdisciplinary projects. In addition, am familiar with agile methodologies such as Scrum, Kanban and start-up jargon such as KPIs, CLV or burn rate.

For more details, please have a look at my CV, my publications and my, a bit dated, showreel. If you are interested to get in touch with me, please do not hesitate to contact me at mail[at]eduardzell.com.