Openings

We are always looking for students who are in pushing the limits of technology further within a Master or Bachelor thesis. We always have a variety of Master thesis topics available from the following areas of research. If you you want to get more detailed information, please get in touch with Prof. Christian Theobalt via Email.

Current Openings

• (Neural) Modeling, Capture and Rendering, 3D/4D Reconstruction, Geometric Deep Learning
• Virtual Human Modeling and Animation

General Information

The new Visual Computing and Artificial Intelligence Department at the Max-Planck-Institute for Informatics has exciting openings for postdocs and research group leaders. The new department is headed by Prof. Christian Theobalt who was recently appointed new Scientific Director at the MPI for Informatics.

The Visual Computing and Artificial Intelligence Department investigates foundational research problems at the intersection of Computer Graphics, Computer Vision and Artificial Intelligence. It is our long term vision to develop entirely new ways to capture, represent, synthesize and simulate models of the real world at highest detail, robustness, and efficiency. To achieve this long term goal, we develop new concepts that rethink and unite established approaches from Computer Graphics and Computer Vision with concepts from Artificial Intelligence, in particular Machine Learning. In the past Prof. Theobalt and his team made widely recognized contributions to graphics and vision, notably in the area of virtual humans and neural rendering, which also received broader attention beyond the scientific community, such as VNect, Face2Face, Deep Video Portraits, DeepCap, Neural Sparse Voxel Fieldsand the spin-off the Captury. 

The department's work lays the foundations for a new way of thinking about computer graphics, and a new way of uniting and enriching the real world with computer graphics technology. It also lays the foundations for advanced computer vision methods to better perceive, understand and interpret the complex real world in motion surrounding us from visual observation, which is an essential capability of future intelligent computing systems that safely and intuitively interact with humans and the human world. 

The department performs foundational research in the following areas and is seeking applications from candidates in these areas

• Virtual Humans
• Neural Representations
• Rendering and Neural Rendering
• Deep Learning for Visual Computing
• AI for Graphics and Vision
• Language Guided Vision and Graphics
• Knowledge Representation for Visual Computing 
• Visual Scene Understanding
• 3D and 4D Reconstruction
• Multi-modal Reconstruction and Synthesis
• Free-viewpoint and 3D Video
• Marker-less Motion and Performance Capture
• 3D Image Analysis and Synthesis
• Inverse Rendering
• Computer Animation 
• Geometric Modeling
• Virtual and Augmented Reality
• New Sensors for Visual Computing
• Physically-based and Image-based Rendering
• New Methods for Human-Compter Interaction
• Quantum Visual Computing

The department provides a unique, inspiring and highly collaborative research environment. It features unique large scale experimental facilities in visual computing for real world data acquisitions, such as multiple real world scanning devices, and several large-scale multi-camera and capture systems for humans and general objects and scenes. The department also has access to excellent computing infrastructure with access to multiple large scale GPU and CPU clusters.

Applicants for postdoc positions should have an outstanding PhD in computer science or related field and have conducted research in one or more of the areas listed above. Applicants should have an excellent track record of publications in the top tier conferences in vision (CVPR, ICCV, ECCV etc.), graphics (EUROGRAPIHCS, SIGGRAPH, SIGGRAPH Asia etc.) or machine learning (NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR etc.). The application package should contain a CV, a statement of research, transcripts and the contacts of at least two academic references.

Research Group Leaders pursue an independent research agenda with their own a small research team. Comprehensive funding for the group leader, personnel and equipment is provided. Applicants for a research group leader position should have an outstanding PhD in computer science or related field and have conducted research in one of the areas listed above. Further, group leader applicants typically have experience as a researcher on a postdoctoral level. Applicants should have an excellent track record of publications in the top tier conferences in computer vision (CVPR, ICCV, ECCV etc.), computer graphics (EUROGRAPIHCS, SIGGRAPH, SIGGRAPH Asia etc.), or machine learning (NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR etc.). The application package should contain a CV, a statement of research describing the research vision for the group, transcripts and the contacts of at least three academic references.

The Max Planck Society seeks to increase the number of women in those areas where they are underrepresented and therefore explicitly encourages women to apply. The Max Planck Society is further committed to employing more individuals with handicaps and particularly encourages these to apply.

Please send your complete application package to via Email to d6-applications@mpi-inf.mpg.de. For questions regarding these positions please directly email Christian Theobalt: theobalt@mpi-inf.mpg.de.

The Max Planck Institute for Informatics is looking for excellent female computer scientists, offering them PostDoc positions to develop their scientific ideas without exertion of influence. For more information please see Lise Meitner Award Postdoctoral Fellowship or contact meitner-award@mpi-inf.mpg.de

We fully encourage applications from talented students who are passionate about a career in research. However, we regularly receive very unspecific PhD applications and CVs which lack a focus and a clear motivation. Please note that we only consider candidates who motivate very thoroughly and convincingly why working with me in my field of research is what they would really like to do. In addition to that an applicant should have an outstanding academic record and should be fluent in both written and spoken English. We also expect research experience in a related field of work, preferably documented by respective high quality publications.

Applications which fail to fulfill these requirements will most likely remain unanswered. Finally, the following helps a successful application: 1) We know the applicant personally (e.g through a Master thesis in our group, research visit, etc.) 2) the applicant obtains recommendations from respected authorities in Computer Vision and/or Machine Learning and/or Graphics or related fields.

Christian Theobalt
MPI Informatik
Campus E1.4
66123 Saarbruecken
Germany

Email: d6-applications@mpi-inf.mpg.de

Further information about selected research projects can be found here.