Bio: Thomas Wiegand is a professor in the department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the Technical University of Berlin and is jointly heading the Fraunhofer Heinrich Hertz Institute, Berlin, Germany. He received the Dipl.-Ing. degree in Electrical Engineering from the Technical University of Hamburg-Harburg, Germany, in 1995 and the Dr.-Ing. degree from the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, Germany, in 2000.
As a student, he was a Visiting Researcher at Kobe University, Japan, the University of California at Santa Barbara and Stanford University, USA, where he also returned as a visiting professor. He was a consultant to Skyfire, Inc., Mountain View, CA, and is currently a consultant to Vidyo, Inc., Hackensack, NJ, USA.
Since 1995, he has been an active participant in standardization for multimedia with many successful submissions to ITU-T and ISO/IEC. In 2000, he was appointed as the Associated Rapporteur of ITU-T VCEG and from 2005-2009, he was Co-Chair of ISO/IEC MPEG Video.
The projects that he co-chaired for the development of the H.264/MPEG-AVC standard have been recognized by an ATAS Primetime Emmy Engineering Award. He was also a recipient of a ATAS Primetime Emmy Engineering Award for the development of H.265/MPEG-HEVC and a pair of NATAS Technology & Engineering Emmy Awards. For his research in video coding and transmission, he received numerous awards including the Vodafone Innovations Award, the EURASIP Group Technical Achievement Award, the Eduard Rhein Technology Award, the Karl Heinz Beckurts Award, the IEEE Masaru Ibuka Technical Field Award, and the IMTC Leadership Award. He received multiple best paper awards for his publications. Since 2014, Thomson Reuters named him in their list of "The World's Most Influential Scientific Minds" as one of the most cited researchers in his field. He is a recipient of the ITU150 Award. He has been elected to the German National Acdemy of Engineering (Acatech) and the National Academy of Science (Leopoldina).
Since 2018, he has been appointed the chair of the ITU/WHO Focus Group on Artificial Intelligence for Health.
Bio: Silvia Miksch is a University Professor and head of the research unit "Visual Analytics" (Centre for Visual Analytics Science and Technology (CVAST)), which is part of Vienna University of Technology (TU Wien), Faculty of Informatics, Institute of Visual Computing and Human-Centered Technology.
She served on various program committees of international scientific conferences (paper co-chair of the IEEE VAST 2010, 2011, 2020, EG EuroVis 2012, etc.), belong(ed) to the editorial board of IEEE TVCG, CGF, etc., and she act(ed) in various strategic and guiding committees, such as the VAST steering committee and the VIS Executive Committee (VEC). Currently, she is chairing the EuroVis steering committee. In 2020, she was inducted into the IEEE Visualization Academy (or in short, Vis Academy). The Vis Academy was established in 2018 by the IEEE VGTC Executive Committee. Induction into the Vis Academy is the highest and most prestigious honor in the field of visualization. In 2023 she was honored for my outstanding technical contributions to VA of time-varying data with the prestigious IEEE VGTC Visualization Technical Achievement Award.
She has more than 300 scientific publications, and her main research interests are visualization and visual analytics over time and space, with a particular focus on interaction techniques, network-based, knowledge-assisted, and guidance-enriched methods. Her cross-cutting application fields are healthcare, digital humanities/arts, financial fraud detection, etc. More information can be found at: https://www.cvast.tuwien.ac.at/team/silvia-miksch
