Pablo Santiago César Garcia

Biography

Research

Dr. Pablo Cesar leads Distributed and Interactive Systems (DIS) group at CWI and is Professor at TU Delft at the Intelligent Systems (INSY) department of 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

• Li, J, Vinayagamoorthy, V, Williamson, J, Shamma, D.A, & César Garcia, P.S. (2021). Social VR: A new medium for remote communication and collaboration. In CHI EA: Extended Abstracts of the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. doi:10.1145/3411763.3441346
• Xue, X, El Ali, A, Ding, G, & César Garcia, P.S. (2021). Investigating the relationship between momentary emotion self-reports and Head and Eye Movements in HMD-based 360 VR video watching. In CHI EA: Extended Abstracts of the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. doi:10.1145/3411763.3451627
• Numan, N, ter Haar, F, & César Garcia, P.S. (2021). Generative RGB-D face completion for head-mounted display removal. In Proceedings - 2021 IEEE Conference on Virtual Reality and 3D User Interfaces Abstracts and Workshops, VRW 2021 (pp. 109–116). doi:10.1109/VRW52623.2021.00028
• Zhang, T, El Ali, A, Wang, C, Hanjalic, A, & César Garcia, P.S. (2021). CorrNet: Fine-grained emotion recognition for video watching using wearable physiological sensors. Sensors, 21(1), 1–25. doi:10.3390/s21010052
• Xue, X, Ding, G, El Ali, A, & César Garcia, P.S. (2020). Annotation tool for precise emotion ground truth label acquisition while 360° VR videos. In Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Virtual Reality (pp. 371–372). doi:10.1109/AIVR50618.2020.00076
• Pons, G, El Ali, A, & César Garcia, P.S. (2020). ET-CycleGAN: Generating thermal images from images in the visible spectrum for facial emotion recognition. In ICMI 2020 Companion - Companion Publication of the 2020 International Conference on Multimodal Interaction (pp. 87–91). doi:10.1145/3395035.3425258
• Gill, A.S, Cabrero Barros, S, César Garcia, P.S, & Shamma, D.A. (2020). AI at the disco: Low sample frequency human activity recognition for night club experiences. In HuMA 2020 - Proceedings of the 1st International Workshop on Human-Centric Multimedia Analysis (pp. 21–29). doi:10.1145/3422852.3423485
• Subramanyam, S, Viola, I, Hanjalic, A, & César Garcia, P.S. (2020). User centered adaptive streaming of dynamic point clouds with low complexity tiling. In Proceedings of the international conference on Multimedia (pp. 3669–3677). doi:10.1145/3394171.3413535
• Chatzitofis, A, Saroglou, L, Boutis, P, Drakoulis, P, Zioulis, N, Subramanyam, S, … Daras, P. (2020). HUMAN4D: A human-centric multimodal dataset for motions and immersive media. IEEE Access, 8, 176241–176262. doi:10.1109/ACCESS.2020.3026276
• Zorilla, M, Masneri, S, Dominguez, A, Tamayo, I, Simiscuka, A, Röggla, T, … Muntean, G.-M. (2020). A novel production workflow and toolset for opera co-creation towards enhanced societal inclusion of people. In Proceedings of the NEM Summit.

Current projects with external funding

• ICT prijs Pablo Cesar Garcia
• 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)

Professional activities

• Professor: Technische Universiteit Delft - [TUD]
• Editor: Editor in Chief: ACM Special Interest Group on Multimedia (SIGMM) Records
• Editor: Associate Editor: IEEE Transactions on Multimedia (IEEE TMM)
• Editor: Associate Editor: ACM Transactions on Multimedia Computing, Communications and Applications (ACM TOMM)
• Editor: Associate Editor: IEEE Multimedia
• Committee member: Steering committee ACM MMsys
• Committee member: Steering committee ACM SIGMM
• Committee member: Steering committee ACM IMX
• Chair: General co-chair ACM IMX 2020
• Chair: General co-chair ACM MMSys 2018
• Chair: General co-chair EuroITV 2007
• Chair: Program co-chair ACM MM 2021
• Chair: Program co-chair IEEE MIPR 2020
• Chair: Program co-chair ACM MMsys 2017
• Chair: Program co-chair ACM TVX 2014
• Chair: Program co-chair EuroITV 2009

Grants

• January 2004 - December 2005: Helsinki Graduate School of Computer Science and Engineering (HeCSE) Graduate Assistantship for postgraduate studies. (2004)
• December 2003: Nokia Foundation Scholarship for postgraduate studies (1 year). (2003)
• June 2003 - June 2004: Department of Computer Science and Engineering at Helsinki university of Technology Graduate Assistantship for postgraduate studies. (2003)
• December 2002: Nokia Foundation Scholarship for postgraduate studies (1 year). (2002)

Awards

• Netherlands Prize for ICT Research (2020)
• Best paper award IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems for Video Technology 2020 (2020)
• Best demo award ACM Multimedia Systems Conference 2020 (2020)
• Best demo award ACM International Conference on Interactive Media Experiences 2020 (2020)
• Second Prize (poster) ICT.Open 2019 (2019)
• Best paper award ACM International Conference on Interactive Experiences for Television and Online Video 2018 (2018)
• Best paper award candidate ACM Symposium on Document Engineering 2018 (2018)
• European Design Award (Silver) for the project “Red Bull Playrooms - The Sixth Sense" (2017)
• Runner up for Best paper award (DASH Forum) ACM Multimedia Systems Conference 2017 (2017)
• ITEA gold award for the Passepartout project (2016)
• Best paper award International Conference on Physiological Computing 2016 (2016)
• Best paper award (DASH Forum) ACM Multimedia Systems Conference 2016 (2016)
• Best paper award on Multimedia Brazilian Symposium on Multimedia and Web (WebMedia) 2013 (2013)
• Best paper award on 3D Technology in Multimedia - ACM Multimedia Systems Conference 2013 (2013)
• Best paper award International Workshop on Interactive Content Consumption 2013 (2013)
• Best paper award candidate - ACM Hypertext Conference 2011 (2011)
• Best paper of ACM Special Interest Group: ACM SIG Multimedia 2008 (2008)
• Best paper award EuroITV Conference 2008 (2008)
• Best paper award candidate - ACM Multimedia 2008 (2008)