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Professor Lourdes de Agapito Vicente delivers the Margaret Boden Annual Lecture on thinking creatively and critically about AI at the University of Sussex.

Building algorithms that can emulate human 3D perception, using as input single images or video sequences taken with a consumer camera, proved to be a challenging task for years but has recently seen astounding progress.

For decades, machine learning solutions faced the challenge of scarcity of 3D annotations, encouraging important advances in weak and self-supervision. However, recent efforts in large-scale paired image-3D dataset collection have led to a paradigm shift and fully supervised feed-forward large 3D reconstruction models have become a reality.

In this talk, Professor Lourdes de Agapito Vicente will describe progress in both static and dynamic 3D reconstruction, from early optimization-based solutions that captured sequence-specific 3D models, towards more powerful 3D-aware neural representations that can be trained from 2D image supervision only, to today’s large transformer-based, multi-view feed-forward models for metric-scale dense 3D reconstruction. She will also describe the successful commercial uptake of this technology and will show its application to AI-driven video synthesis.

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About Lourdes de Agapito Vicente

Lourdes holds the position of Professor of 3D Vision at the Department of Computer Science, University College London (UCL) where she heads the Vision and Imaging Science Group. She received her BSc, MSc and PhD degrees from Universidad Complutense de Madrid (Spain). In 1997 she joined the Robotics Research Group at the University of Oxford as an EU Marie Curie Fellow. In 2001 she was appointed Lecturer at Queen Mary University of London, where she held an ERC Grant. Lourdes joined UCL in 2013 and was promoted to full professor in 2015. Her research in computer vision has consistently focused on the inference of 3D information from images or videos acquired with a single camera. Lourdes has served as Program Chair for CVPR 2016 and ICCV 2023, serves regularly as Area Chair for the top Computer Vision conferences (CVPR, ICCV, ECCV) and was Keynote speaker at ICRA 2017, ICLR 2021 and ECCV'24. Lourdes is co-founder of London-based startup Synthesia, the world’s largest AI video generation platform for business, currently valued at $4B. Synthesia's text-to-video technology allows users to create professional videos directly on the browser, removing the physical constraints of conventional production.

About Margaret Boden

Professor Margaret Boden OBE was a pioneering figure in cognitive science and artificial intelligence, based at the University of Sussex from 1965. In 2017 she won the ACM AAAI Allen Newell Award in recognition of her career-long contribution to the field.

Professor Boden played a crucial part in early and career-long discussions on the risks and benefits of AI, as well producing seminal work to define and nurture the area of computational creativity and creative cognition. Her work bridged psychology, philosophy, and computer science, and helped shaped Sussex’s reputation as a hub for interdisciplinary research. She served as Dean of the School of Social Sciences, and in the early 1970s she played a central role in establishing first the Cognitive Studies Programme, and then the School of Cognitive and Computing Studies, becoming its founding Dean.

About Sussex AI

Sussex AI is an interdisciplinary centre of excellence at the University of Sussex. It builds on the long tradition of high-profile research from the School of COGS in the very beginning to the natural language processing group, the evolutionary and adaptive systems group, the centre for computational neuroscience, the centre for consciousness science and robotics more recently. Sussex AI brings these aspects together with the broader AI and data science related research being carried out across the university including the Data-Intensive Science Centre at the University of Sussex (DISCUS). Within Sussex AI we are creating a collaborative, supportive and inclusive research community for all those interested in methodological developments, applications and implications of artificial intelligence and data science techniques.

About the ESRC Centre for Digital Futures at Work

The ESRC Centre for Digital Futures at Work conducts cutting-edge academic research into the real world challenges, opportunities, risks and benefits of the ongoing digital transformation of work. We aim to generate new knowledge about the impacts of the transition on employers, workers, job-seekers and governments. Digit is jointly led by the University of Sussex Business School and Leeds University Business School, with Co-Directors Professor Jacqueline O’Reilly (University of Sussex Business School) and Professor Mark Stuart (Leeds University Business School). We also have partners at the universities of Cambridge, Manchester and Monash, the Institute of Development of Studies, the Institute for the Future of Work, and FutureDotNow.

About the ESRC Business and Local Government Data Research Centre

The ESRC Business and Local Government Data Research Centre enables renowned researchers to work with organisations effecting real change to help resolve the biggest challenges of our time. The Centre collaborates with private sector, public sector and not-for-profit organisations who can wield the transformative power of data to benefit their communities. By supporting them in implementing best practice, the Centre creates real-world impact, influencing policy and informing practice.