Timo Bolkart is a Senior Research Scientist at Google Zürich and former researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems. His work lies at the intersection of computer vision, computer graphics, and machine learning, with a particular focus on 3D human face and body modeling, non-rigid shape analysis, and neural rendering. Timo has contributed to several influential projects in 3D vision and facial animation, including DECA, VOCA, and TEMPEH, and has authored numerous papers at top venues such as CVPR, SIGGRAPH, and ECCV.

Javier Romero is a Research Scientist at Meta's Codec Avatar research lab. He is a leading researcher in computer vision and 3D human modeling whose work has had a major impact on the fields of human body reconstruction, motion analysis, and digital humans. Javier is widely known as one of the creators of the influential SMPL body model, which has become a foundational representation for 3D human pose and shape estimation across computer vision and graphics research. His work bridges machine learning, geometry, and graphics, enabling realistic and scalable modeling of human motion and appearance for applications in AR/VR, animation, and embodied AI.

Juyong Zhang is a Professor at the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC) and a leading researcher in computer graphics and 3D vision. His research focuses on geometric modeling, digital humans, neural rendering, and high-fidelity 3D reconstruction, with influential contributions spanning computer vision, graphics, and AI-driven content generation. Juyong is a recipient of the Excellent Young Scholars Award from the National Science Foundation of China.

Vanessa Sklyarova is a PhD student at the Max Planck ETH Center for Learning Systems (MPI-IS & ETH Zürich) jointly supervised by Justus Thies (MPI), Michael Black (MPI), Otmar Hilliges (ETH) and Marc Pollefeys (ETH). Her work focuses on high-fidelity digital humans, with a particular emphasis on strand-level hair and fur reconstruction as well as neural rendering. She is a recipient of the Best Paper Runner-Up Award at 3DV 2026 for her work on NeuralFur, highlighting her contributions to realistic and physically grounded 3D reconstruction of complex natural structures.

Zhuo Su is a Tech Lead and Researcher at ByteDance, working on Human-Centric AI. His long-term goal is to develop machine intelligence grounded in human experiences, capable of understanding people, modeling human behaviors, and enabling natural interactions between humans, AI agents, robots and worlds. Zhuo has received several distinctions for both research and innovation, including the PICO “Star Team Award” Innovation Breakthrough Award at ByteDance, the Tencent Open Source Collaboration Award, and recognition as an Outstanding Graduate of Beijing and Tsinghua University.

Christian Theobalt is a director at the Max Planck Institute for Informatics and a leading figure in computer vision and computer graphics. His research has been instrumental in advancing neural rendering, performance capture, and digital human reconstruction, shaping many of the field’s most impactful developments. Christian is widely recognized for his scientific excellence, including being awarded an ERC Consolidator Grant (2017) and ERC Starting Grant (2013), the EUROGRAPHICS Outstanding Technical Contributions Award (2020), the EUROGRAPHICS Young Researcher Award (2009), and the German Pattern Recognition Award (DAGM, 2012). He is also a Fellow of EUROGRAPHICS and a recipient of the prestigious Otto Hahn Medal of the Max Planck Society, among numerous other honors recognizing both his research and leadership in the field.