Inverse Graphics, Appearance Modeling, Physically Based Rendering

I am an associate professor leading the Realistic Graphics Lab at EPFL. My research revolves around inverse graphics, appearance modeling and physically based rendering algorithms. The motivating idea is easily explained: if one could backpropagate derivatives through a rendering algorithm, then it should be possible to employ a variant of gradient descent to run a rendering algorithm «in reverse» and reconstruct the world from images or other kinds of data. This turns out to be harder than one would think, which makes it an interesting research topic. I also enjoy working on compilers systems and tinkering with optical assemblies in our measurement lab. I would like to build a truly robust and general «TensorFlow» for physically realistic inverse graphics and connect it to useful applications in different scientific domains.