Dr Jean-Marc Odobez (Msc 1990, PhD 1994) received his Ph.D degree from Rennes University in 1994 for his PhD dissertation done at INRIA. After 5 years as an assistant professor at the University du Maine, France, he decided to join Idiap, where he is now the Head of the Perception & Activity Understanding Group and adjunct faculty at EPFL in the school of engineering and a member of the Electrical Engineering Doctoral committee (EDEE).
His research interests are the design of multimodal perception systems rooted in computer vision, statistical machine learning and deep learning, or social sciences, for activity and behavior recognition, human-human or human-robot interaction modeling and understanding. Application domains include human health assessment, social robotics, or media content analysis. He has published more than 50 journals and 160 conference refereed papers in his research field. He has been the principal investigator of more than 16 European and Swiss projects, and has worked on 10 tech transfer projects with SMEs. He holds several patents in computer vision, and is the cofounder of Klewel SA (www.klewel.ch) and Eyeware SA (eyeware.tech), a tech company in eye tracking and attention modeling. He is an IEEE member and associate editor of the Machine Vision and Application journal. He regularly serves as area chair for the ICMI, ICCV, CVPR or ECCV conferences.