Iain Matthews
Director of Research Science at Epic Games
Iain Matthews is an experienced research director with respected contributions in both industry and academia. Iain received a BEng degree in electronic engineering and a PhD in computer science from the University of East Anglia in the UK. He moved to the USA to join the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. In 2006 he spent two years in New Zealand at the visual effects company Weta Digital contributing to the FACETS facial motion capture system while working on the movies Avatar and Tintin, and was awarded a Scientific and Engineering Award (a technical Oscar) for this work in 2017. He joined the newly formed Disney Research in Pittsburgh in 2008 to build the computer vision group and in 2013 was promoted to Associate Director of the Pittsburgh lab. Prior to joining Epic Games he spent a couple of years at Oculus Research / Facebook Reality Labs working on social VR/AR.
Iain's mission is pioneering technology to enable real-time interactive digital characters. Interaction is a critical component towards positive and meaningful connections in 3D worlds and Metaverses. Achieving this requires advancing the state of the art of real-time computer vision, computer graphics, and machine learning / artifical intelligence. Towards these goals he leads a team of awesome research scientists, engineers, and collaborators at Epic Games working on a portfolio of ML/AI and digital human related projects. He also holds a courtesy faculty appointment at the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University and an Honorary Professor position at the University of East Anglia. He has published over 140 academic papers and been issued more than 25 US patents.
Selected Publications
- A Deep Learning Approach for Generalized Speech AnimationACM Transactions on Graphics (Proc. ACM SIGGRAPH), Aug 2017
- 2D vs. 3D Deformable Face Models: Representational Power, Construction and Real-Time FittingInternational Journal of Computer Vision, Oct 2007
- Lucas-Kanade 20 Years On: A Unifying FrameworkInternational Journal of Computer Vision, Feb 2004