Dr. Andreas Aristidou

Andreas Aristidou          

Assistant Professor
Graphics Virtual Reality Lab, University of Cyprus
a.aristidou@ieee.org
Motion Capture, Motion Synthesis and Analysis, Animations, Inverse Kinematics, Geometric Algebra

       
Andreas Aristidou

Dr Andreas Aristidou is an Assistant Professor at the University of Cyprus, and an Adjunct Research Fellow at the RISE centre of excellence with special interest in computer graphics and character animation. Previously, he served as Senior PostDoc Researcher at the Efi Arazi School of Computer Science, The Interdisciplinary Center Herzliya in Israel (2016-2018), the Interdisciplinary Research Center, Shandong University in China (2015), the Graphics Virtual Reality Lab, University of Cyprus (2012-2014,2019), and the Digital Heritage Research Lab, Cyprus University of Technology (2015). He had been a Cambridge European Trust fellow, at the Signal Processing and Communications Laboratory, University of Cambridge, where he obtained his PhD (2011). Andreas has a BSc in Informatics and Telecommunications from the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens (2005) and he is an honor graduate of Kings College London (2006), where he obtained his MSc degree in Mobile and Personal Communications (2006).

His main research interests are focused on 3D motion analysis and classification, motion synthesis, human animation, and involve motion capture, inverse kinematics, and applications of conformal geometric algebra in graphics. Andreas is on the editorial board of The Visual Computer (TVC) journal, and serves as an Associate Editor. He participated in a number of EU funded projects, serving as Deputy Manager of the ITN-DCH (Initial Training Network for Digital Cultural Heritage) at the Digital Heritage Research Lab, Cyprus University of Technology, and Principal Investigator of the Vi.Da.Pe (Visual Dance Performance for Interactive Characters), SCHEDAR (Safeguarding the Cultural HEritage of Dance through Augmented Reality), and SIM.POL.VR (Virtual Reality Police Simulator) projects, at the Graphics Virtual Reality Lab, University of Cyprus. He collaborates with EU creative industries to design innovative algorithm for motion synthesis and character retargeting. Finally, he is the co-author of the FABRIK Inverse Kinematics solver that been integrated in all major game engines (e.g., Unity, Panda, and Unreal engines), and published in open-source libraries.


Open Positions at the Graphics Virtual Reality lab

  • Research Associate (Full time, 24 months) - Project: DEMONSTRATION. Deadline: 30 April 2021

    The project «DEep MOtioN SynThesis foR character AnimaTION (DEMONSTRATION)» covers a wide range of multidisciplinary topics that are in line with the recent tendencies in computer graphics, character animation, and virtual reality. It aims at investigating modern trends in machine (deep, convolutional, adversarial, and reinforcement) learning, with ultimate target to provide ingenious solutions for overcoming the current limitations in character animation, and essentials for future improvements in a wide range of ambitious and challenging projects, such as interactive dance motion synthesis, and motion summarization via internal contextual distribution matching.

    More details in Greek and English


Awards

  • Research funding (2021-2023) from the Research and Innovation center, University of Cyprus (€60K).
  • Awarded the seed grant (2020-2021) by the Cyprus Seeds organization, to commercialize his innovative academic research in motion capturing (€25K).
  • Start-up funding (2020-2022) from the Research and Innovation center, University of Cyprus (€50K).
  • ΔΙΔΑΚΤΩΡ fellowship, by the Cyprus Research Promotion Foundation, to establish research in motion analysis and classification (€125K).
  • Awarded the nVIDIA GPU grant, to investigate deep learning methods for motion synthesis and analysis, 2017.
  • Awarded the Erasmus Mundus Grant for visiting scholars (2018) to undertake teaching and research activities in the context of dance as Intangible Cultural Heritage (Choreomundus International Master).
  • Best paper award at the 12th Eurographics Workshop on Graphics and Cultural Heritage (GCH’14), for the paper “Motion Analysis for Folk Dance Evaluation”, co-authors: E. Stavrakis, and Y. Chrysanthou.
  • Office of Naval Research Global (ONRG) Visiting Scientist Program (VSP) scholarship to visit PhaseSpace Inc. offices in San Leandro, CA, USA, in order to be trained and gain experiences on subjects relative to motion capture (€4.5K).
  • PhaseSpace Inc. awarded him with a full 8-camera X2 motion capture system, providing the essentials to establish his own motion capture laboratory at the Graphics and Virtual Reality Lab, University of Cyprus. They also donated a multiLED board (hand glove) in order to practise hand reconstruction methodologies on their software (€60K).
  • Following his novel research in folk dance digitization, Andreas was part of a consortium that has been awarded the DARIAH-EU Theme 2015 in Open Humanities for organizing a workshop on e-documentation of Intangible Cultural Heritage (€6K).
  • Cambridge European Trust Bursary for PhD studies at the University of Cambridge (€13.5K).

© 2017 Andreas Aristidou