Pablo Santiago César Garcia

Biography

Research

Dr. Pablo Cesar leads Distributed and Interactive Systems group (http://www.dis.cwi.nl) at CWI and is Associate Professor at TU Delft. Pablo‘s research focuses on modeling and controlling complex collections of media objects (including real-time media and sensor data) that are distributed in time and space.

Recently, he has received the prestigious 2020 Netherlands Prize for ICT Research because of his work on human-centered multimedia systems. “The jury praises Cesar for his impressive scientific achievements and his ability to communicate his research in an understandable way. Cesar reaches and inspires people inside and outside his field.”

Dr.  Cesar’s research focuses on measuring and evaluating the way users interact and communicate with each other using a wide range of decentralized digital systems. His scientific research has been recognized worldwide with nine best paper awards at top venues, and he is a prominent international figure in the field of human-centered multimedia systems. In particular, his more recent work focuses on evaluating quality of experience within immersive media, with a core contribution on multi-party videoconferencing and point cloud compression and delivery. This work was recently adopted within the MPEG and ITU standardization processes. Cesar has (co-)directed 14 externally funded research projects with a total research income of almost €5M. He is co-advisor of five completed PhD students, with four other students currently in process.

The vision behind Dr. Cesar’s work is a future where multimedia systems will be human-centered and thus capable of understanding the user(s) and the environment, providing empathic and highly customized experiences that are immersive and interactive. The research thus focuses on facilitating and improving the way people access media and communicate with others and with the environment, addressing key problems resulting from the dense connectivity of content, people and devices. Cesar’s research combines data science techniques with a strong human-centric, empirical approach to understanding the experiences of users. This enables him to design and develop next generation intelligent and empathic systems. He bases his results on realistic testing grounds and data sets, and embraces areas such as healthcare and wellbeing, education, smart cities, and creative industries.

His mission is to bring core human-computer interaction methodologies to computer science research, and his firm conviction is that for a humane future and for solving tomorrow’s scientific challenges, an interdisciplinary research approach is required. Cesar initiates projects where computer scientists explore problems together with other professionals (sociologists, artists, designers, educators or health professionals, depending on the goal). A combination of expertise provides a plethora of methodologies and approaches that can be applied depending on the problem and the stage of the research (from simulations to field trials, from performance testing to model prediction).

Publications

• Xue, X, Ghosh, S, Ding, G, El Ali, A, & César Garcia, P.S. (2020). Designing Real-time, Continuous Emotion Annotation Techniques for 360° VR Videos. In Extended Abstracts of the 2020 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 1–9).
• Viola, I, Subramanyam, S, & César Garcia, P.S. (2020). A color-based objective quality metric for point cloud contents. In Twelfth International Conference on Quality of Multimedia Experience.
• Viola, I, Mulder, J, De Simone, F, & César Garcia, P.S. (2019). Temporal Interpolation of Dynamic Digital Humans using Convolutional Neural Networks. In Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Virtual Reality.
• Viola, I, Mulder, J.N, De Simone, F, & César Garcia, P.S. (2019). Temporal interpolation of dynamic digital humans using convolutional neural networks. In Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Virtual Reality (pp. 90–97). doi:10.1109/AIVR46125.2019.00022
• Webb, A.M, & César Garcia, P.S. (2019). Uncovering Seams in Distributed Play of Tabletop Role-Playing Games. In Extended Abstracts of the Annual Symposium on Computer-Human Interaction in Play.
• Zhang, T, El Ali, A, Wang, C, Zhu, X, & César Garcia, P.S. (2019). CorrFeat: Correlation-based feature extraction algorithm using skin conductance and pupil diameter for emotion recognition. In ICMI 2019 - Proceedings of the 2019 International Conference on Multimodal Interaction (pp. 404–408). doi:10.1145/3340555.3353716
• El Ali, A, Ashby, L.M, Webb, A.M, Zwitser, R, & César Garcia, P.S. (2019). Uncovering perceived identification accuracy of in-vehicle biometric sensing. In Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Automotive User Interfaces and Interactive Vehicular Applications: Adjunct Proceedings (pp. 327–334). doi:10.1145/3349263.3351506
• Rao, S, El Ali, A, & César Garcia, P.S. (2019). DeepSleep: A ballistocardiographic deep learning approach for classifying sleep stages. In UbiComp/ISWC 2019- - Adjunct Proceedings of the 2019 ACM International Joint Conference on Pervasive and Ubiquitous Computing and Proceedings of the 2019 ACM International Symposium on Wearable Computers (pp. 187–190). doi:10.1145/3341162.3343758
• Li, J, Kong, Y, Röggla, T, De Simone, F, Ananthanarayan, S, de Ridder, H, … César Garcia, P.S. (2019). Measuring and understanding photo sharing experiences in social virtual reality. In Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems - Proceedings. doi:10.1145/3290605.3300897
• Röggla, T, Li, J, Fjellsten, S, Jansen, A.J, Kegel, I, Pilgrim, L, … César Garcia, P.S. (2019). From the lab to the OB truck: Object-based broadcasting at the FA Cup in Wembley Stadium. In Proceedings of the Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. doi:10.1145/3290607.3299038

Current projects with external funding

• MediaScape
• PPS Automotive
• Overeenkomst met Xinhua Network(deel 2): Cooperation of Industry Doctor (PPS Xinhua Network (deel 2))
• Opera co-creation for a social transformation (TRACTION)
• An end-to-end system for the production and delivery of photorealistic social immersive virtual reality experiences (VRTogether)

Professional activities

• Professor: Technische Universiteit Delft - [TUD]
• Committee member: International Federation for Information Processing - [IFIP] - WG 14.6
• Committee member: W3C Web and TV Interest Group - [WebTV]
• Committee member: Moving Picture Experts Group 3D Graphics - [MPEG 3DG]
• Committee member: International Telecommunication Union - [ITU] 2013-01
• Committee member: ACM International Multimedia Conference - [ACM Multimedia]
• Committee member: ACM Symposium on Document Engineering - [DocEng]
• Committee member: ACM Multimedia Systems Conference - [MMSys]
• Committee member: IEEE International Conference on Multimedia and Expo - [ICME]
• Committee member: International Workshop on Quality of Multimedia Experience - [QoMEX]
• Committee member: International Workshop on Network and OS Support for Digital Audio/Video -[NOSSDAV]
• Committee member: ACM International Conference on Interactive Experiences for Television and Online Video - [ACM TVX]
• Committee member: International Workshop on Human-Centered Event Understanding for Multimedia -[HuEvent]
• Committee member: ACM Creativity and Cognition - [ACM C&C]
• Chair: ACM International Conference on Interactive Experiences for Television and Online Video - [ACM TVX]
• Editor: Journal: International Journal on Multimedia Tools and Applications - [MTA]
• Editor: ACM Computers and Entertainment
• Editor: ACM Transactions on Multimedia Computing, Communications, and Applications-¬‐[TOMCCAP]
• Editor: Journal: ACM Computers and Entertainment
• Editor: Journal: Multimedia Tools and Applications - [MTA]
• Editor: Journal: ACM SIGMultimedia Records
• Editor: Journal: ACM Transactions on Multimedia Computing, Communications, and Applications- [TOMCCAP

Awards

• Second prize award for publication https://ir.cwi.nl/pub/29060 at ICT Open 2019 (2019)
• Second Best Paper Award (with J.W. Kleinrouweler and B. Meixner) (2017)
• Best Paper - on 3D Technology in Multimedia (with Rufael Mekuria and D.C.A.Bulterman) ACM Multimedia Systems Conference, 2013 (2013)
• Best Paper - (with C. Wang International Workshop on Interactive Content Consumption, 2013 (2013)
• Best Paper on Multimedia (with R.L. Guimaraes and D.C.A. Bulterman) WebMedia, 2013 (2013)
• Beste paper New Comer Candidate - With V. Zsombori, M. Frantzis, R.L. Guimaraes, M.F. Ursu, P. Cesar, I. Kegel, R. Craigie, and D.C.A. Bulterman, (ACM HT 2011 (2011)
• EuroITV 2008 - Best paper (with D. C. A. Bulterman and A. J. Jansen) (2008)
• ACM international conference on multimedia, October - Best paper in track award (with D. C. A. Bulterman and A. J. Jansen) (2008)