Marc Pollefeys receives SNSF Advanced Grant
Professor Marc Pollefeys is the recipient of a prestigious Advanced Grant currently awarded by the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF). Congratulations!
Since Switzerland is now a non-associated third country in the Horizon Europe programme, researchers from Swiss universities are currently not eligible to apply for an Advanced Grant from the European Research Council. This funding is a transitional measure offered by the Swiss Confederation with the aim to offer research funding for leading scientists, who wish to conduct innovative high-risk research in Switzerland.
Marc Pollefeys’ research on 3D models was one of the 18 projects selected in the current round. Algorithms can now calculate true-to-original three-dimensional virtual reality models directly from photographs. It does not work on functional and interactive objects like doors, drawers, light switches, keyboards or touch screens, unless they are programmed painstakingly by hand with appropriate software. Professor Pollefeys will develop algorithms that can automatically create 3D models of functional objects from visual information in his project. These algorithms will evaluate, among other things, the interactions of users with the objects and infer their functionality, which will facilitate the creation of dynamic 3D models for planning and simulation software or entertainment such as mixed reality games.
More about Marc Pollefeys
He is a full professor at the Department of Computer Science at ETH Zurich and the Director of the Microsoft Mixed Reality and AI Lab, where he works with a team of scientists and engineers to develop advanced perception capabilities for HoloLens and Mixed Reality. Marc Pollefeys is best known for his contributions to the field of 3D computer vision by pioneering a software pipeline that automates the conversion of photographs into 3D models. He also actively engages in research on robotics, graphics, and machine learning, tackling various challenging problems in these domains. Some of his noteworthy projects are real-time 3D scanning using mobile devices, developing a live pipeline for reconstructing 3D models of cities from vehicle-mounted cameras, designing camera-based autonomous vehicles, and creating the first fully independent drone relying solely on vision-based navigation. His most recent academic research has focused on combining 3D reconstruction with semantic scene understanding.
Marc Pollefeys has received several prizes for his research, including a Google Focus Award (2020), a Sony Faculty Innovation Award (2020) and an ERC Starting Grant (2008). He was elected Fellow of the IEEE and ACM Fellow and is a member of the Academia Europaea.