Rafael Kuffner

Im a Computer Science and engineering PhD student with a research grant on the Black box project. My research focus is on Video based Rendering, a recent and growing field from computer vision and computer graphics. I'm interested on 3D reconstruction techniques, data capture, but mostly data representation and how can one capture, and represent data from a real world event and be able to display it again from a user chosen viewpoint. I started my Studies at Instituto Superior Técnico – IST/UTL (Lisbon), with the Visualization and Intelligent Multimodal Interfaces (VIMMI) Group of INESC-ID, where I also took my bachelors and masters course, with a thesis focused on Image-based collision detection. I have worked on different research projects throughout the years, starting on the third year of my bachelors degree on a Serious game project with VIMMI. With the Intelligent agents and synthetic charaters (GAIPS) group of INESC-ID i worked on the development of a machinima tool for a movie producing company, acting as team leader during most of the project duration. More recently I've worked together with the Global Lab at the National Institute of Informatics in Tokyo, being a part of the iCO2 project.

On the BlackBox platform, I'm mostly interested at the capture and representation of information of the human performers, and building the technology that will help people from different areas draw conclusion about the deeper meaning of what is there represented.