University of Zagreb

Department of Telecommunications on the Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computing, University of Zagreb is established in 1951. Areas of research interest are in the field of information technologies and telecommunications. The research group that collaborates with HUMAINE started with work in 2002 with particular focus on the face animation. Different methods for animation of a speaking avatar are investigated with special task of achieving naturalness of conversational agents and avatars by incorporating gestures and emotions into generated facial animation.

Igor S. Pandzic is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Telecommunications, Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computing, University of Zagreb, Croatia. He teaches several undergraduate and postgraduate courses in the fields of virtual environments and multimedia communications. His main research interests are in the field of computer graphics and virtual environments, with particular focus on facial animation, embodied conversational agents, and their applications in networked and mobile environments. Igor also worked on networked collaborative virtual environments, computer generated film production and parallel computing. He published three books and around 60 papers on these topics. Formerly he worked as a Senior Assistant at MIRALab, University of Geneva, Switzerland, where he obtained his PhD in 1998. The same year he worked as visiting scientist at AT&T Labs, USA. In 2001-2002 Igor was a visiting scientist in the Image Coding Group at the University of Linköping, Sweden. Igor received his BSc degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Zagreb in 1993, and MSc degrees from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL) and the University of Geneva in 1994 and 1995, respectively. Igor was one of the key contributors to the Facial Animation specification in the MPEG-4 International Standard for which he received an ISO Certificate of Appreciation in 2000. He held various functions in organizing numerous international conferences and served as guest editor for a special topic in IEEE Communications Magazine. Igor has been active in international research collaborations within the EU research programmes since the 3rd Framework Programme, as well as in national research projects and collaboration with industry.

Karlo Smid works in "Ericsson Nikola Tesla" Zagreb, as a solution integrator for enterprise systems. In the 1997 he graduated and received a degree of a B.Sc.E.E. on Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computing (FER), University of Zagreb, Croatia. In the year 2000 he started postgraduate study on the same University. During that postgraduate study his interest was full face animation produced automatically from plain English text using lexical analysis of English text and statistical models of facial gestures related to spoken text. In the 2004 he graduated and received a degree of a MSc.E.E. In 2005 on FER he started study towards a PhD academic degree.

Goranka Zoric is an associate assistant at the Department of Telecommunications, Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computing, University of Zagreb, Croatia. Her main research interests are in the  field of facial animation and its application with Internet and mobile technologies and virtual environments with particular focus on automatic lip synchronization and gesturing of synthetic 3D avatars based only on the speech input. Goranka received her B.SC. degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Zagreb in 2002., while M.Sc. degree is expected in 2005.