| Prof Nadia Magnenat Thalmann
Director, Institute for Media Innovation
Visiting Professor
Division of Visual & Interactive Computing
School of Computer Engineering
College of Engineering
Email: NADIATHALMANN@ntu.edu.sg
Phone: (+65)6592 1892
Office: RTP-XF-03 [IMI] |
| Education |
- PhD (Quantum Physics) University of Geneva 1977
- Postgrad Cert (CompSc & Math) Ecole Polytechnique Federale De Lausanne 1977
- Postgrad Cert (Stat & CompSc) University of Geneva 1975
- MSc (Dip) Biochem University of Geneva 1972
- MSc (licence) Biol University of Geneva 1966
- MSc (licence) Psych University of Geneva 1966
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| Biography |
Professor Nadia Magnenat Thalmann has pioneered research into virtual humans over the last 30 years. She obtained several Bachelor's and Master's degrees in various disciplines (Psychology, Biology and Biochemistry) and a PhD in Quantum Physics from the University of Geneva in 1977. From 1977 to 1989, she was a Professor at the University of Montreal in Canada.
Since 1989, she is a Professor at the University of Geneva where she founded the interdisciplinary research group MIRALab. Her global domain of research is Virtual Humans and Social Robots. She has acquired a great experience of collaborative research through her strong participation to more than 50 European Research Projects. She has coordinated several projects, the most recent one is the Marie Curie Project MUSTISCALE HUMAN.
She is Editor-in-Chief of The Visual Computer Journal published by Springer Verlag, Co- Editor-in-Chief of the journal Computer Animation and Virtual Worlds published by Wiley and Associate Editor of many other scientific journals.
Together with her PhD students, she has published more than 500 papers and books on Virtual Humans and Social Robots with research topics such as 3D clothes, hair, body gestures and emotions modelling, and medical simulation.
She has been invited to give more than 300 keynote lectures in various institutions and organizations, among them the World Economic Forum in Davos. She was Vice-Rector at the University of Geneva from 2003-2006. She is a Member and President of high level international evaluation committees, among the recent ones the Jury of the Vienna Science and Technology Fund, the Advisory Board for Computer Science at Tsinghua University in Beijing, China and the Canada Excellence Research Chairs Review Panel in Ottawa.
During her Career, she has received more than 30 Awards such as “Woman in the Year” in Montreal in 1987. Among the recent ones, she was awarded a Doctor Honoris Causa in Natural Sciences from the Leibniz University of Hanover in Germany in 2009. In May 2010, she received the Distinguished Career Award from the European Association for Computer Graphics in Norrkoping in Sweden and in June 2010, an Honorary Doctorate of the University in Ottawa. In 2012, she has obtained a Career Achievement Award from the Canadian Human Computer Communications Society in Toronto.
Very recently, she received the prestigious Humboldt Research Award in Germany given to “academics whose fundamental discoveries, new theories, or insights have had a significant impact on their own discipline and who are expected to continue producing cutting-edge achievements in the future”.
Besides directing her research group MIRALab in Switzerland, she is presently Professor and Director of the Institute for Media Innovation (IMI) at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. |
| Research Interests |
Nadia Magnenat-Thalmann’s interests are mainly on Virtual humans, both on the creative and the algorithmic side. One recent interest is to model the physiological Virtual Human, including specific individual modelling of organs.
Among recent topics of interests :
- Physics-based modelling of Clothes
- Simulating the touching of clothes using haptics and force-feed back devices
- Interactive Virtual try on
- Modelling personalities, emotions, memory processes and relationship models for Virtual Humans and Social Robots
- Modeling bones, cartilage and muscles from MRI data
- Physics-based modelling of deformations of soft tissue
- Motion capture methods and motion retargeting
- Segmentation methods for MRI data |
| Research Grant |
- Institute for Media Innovation Grant (2013-)
- NTU Internal Funding - IMI - MDA IDMPO Award for BeingThere Centre (2012-2014) [by Nanyang Technological University]
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| Current Projects |
- 3D Interactive Visualization of the Human Body In An Immersive Situation
- Autonomous Virtual Humans and Social Robot For Telepresence
| Selected Publications | - C. Charbonnier, F.C. Kolo, V.B. Duthon, N. Magnenat Thalmann, C.D. Becker, P. Hoffmeyer and J. Menetrey. (2012). Semi/supervised biased maximum margin analysis for SVM relevance feedback in image retrieval. IEEE Transactions on Image Processing, .
- Quan Yuan, Gao Cong, Aixin Sun, Chin-Yew Lin, Nadia M. Thalmann. (2012). Category Hierarchy Maintenance: A Data-Driven Approach. ACM SIGIR Conference (pp. 791 – 800).
- J. Schmid, J. Kim and N. Magnenat Thalmann. (2011). Robust Statistical Shape Models for MRI Bone Segmentation in Presence of Small Field of View. medical image analysis, 15(168), 155-168.
- P. Volino, N. Magnenat Thalmann, F. Faure. (2009). A simple Approach to Nonlinear Tensile Stiffness for Accurate Cloth Simulation. ACM Transactions on Graphics, 28(4), 105-116.
- Z. Kazap, M. Ben Moussa, P. Chaudhuri, N. Magnenat Thalmann. (2009). Making Them Remember -Emotional Virtual Characters with Memory. IEEE Computer Graphics & Applications (CG & A), 29(2), 20-29.
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