Lourdes De Agapito Vicente
Professor of 3D Computer Vision at University College London & Co-Founder at Synthesia Technologies
Synthesia: From computer vision research to real-world AI avatars
Synthesia is one of Europe’s newest billion-euro startups. Its core technology is script-to-video: realistic AI avatars delivering compelling presentations to the virtual camera. Used by over 50,000 companies worldwide, including 400 of the Fortune 500, computer vision technology operates in the real world. Lourdes Agapito will talk about the development of this technology, from computer vision research papers to real-world products.
Bio
Lourdes Agapito holds the Professor of 3D Vision position at the Department of Computer Science, University College London (UCL). Her research in computer vision has consistently focused on the inference of 3D information from single images or videos acquired from a moving camera.
She received her BSc, MSc and PhD degrees from the Universidad Complutense de Madrid (Spain). In 1997, she joined the Robotics Research Group at the University of Oxford as an EU Marie Curie Postdoctoral Fellow. In 2001, she was appointed Lecturer in the Department of Computer Science at Queen Mary University of London. From 2008 to 2014, she held an ERC Starting Grant funded by the European Research Council to focus on theoretical and practical aspects of deformable 3D reconstruction from monocular sequences.
In 2013, she joined the Department of Computer Science at University College London and was promoted to full professor in 2015. Lourdes is the Program Chair for CVPR 2016 and ICCV 2023 and serves regularly as Area Chair for the top Computer Vision conferences (CVPR, ICCV, ECCV). She was keynote speaker at ICRA 2017, ICLR 2021 and 3DV 2022. In 2017, she co-founded Synthesia, the London-based generative AI startup responsible for the technology behind the Malaria no More video campaign that saw David Beckham speak 9 different languages to call on world leaders to take action to defeat Malaria.
