Iain Matthews

Director of Research Science at Epic Games

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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

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    Speech Driven Tongue Animation
    IEEE Computer Society Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, Jun 2022
  2. Joo-2017.jpg
    Panoptic Studio: A Massively Multiview System for Social Interaction Capture
    Hanbyul JooTomas Simon, Xulong Li, Hao Liu, Lei Tan, Lin Gui, Sean Banerjee, Timothy Godisart, Bart NabbeIain MatthewsTakeo KanadeShohei Nobuhara, and Yaser Sheikh
    IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, Dec 2017
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    A Deep Learning Approach for Generalized Speech Animation
    ACM Transactions on Graphics (Proc. ACM SIGGRAPH), Aug 2017
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    Multi-PIE
    Ralph GrossIain MatthewsJeffrey CohnTakeo Kanade, and Simon Baker
    Image and Vision Computing, May 2010
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    2D vs. 3D Deformable Face Models: Representational Power, Construction and Real-Time Fitting
    Iain MatthewsJing Xiao, and Simon Baker
    International Journal of Computer Vision, Oct 2007
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    Lucas-Kanade 20 Years On: A Unifying Framework
    Simon Baker, and Iain Matthews
    International Journal of Computer Vision, Feb 2004