Visual
Computing

Bickel group

Faculty

 Bernd Bickel

Bernd Bickel

Bernd Bickel heads the Computational Design and Digital Fabrication group at ISTA. He is a computer scientist interested in computer graphics and its overlap into robotics, computer vision, machine learning, material science, and digital fabrication. His main objective is to push the boundaries of how digital content can be efficiently created, simulated, and reproduced.

Administrative Assistants

 Dafne Rosina Valdez Lopez

Dafne Rosina Valdez Lopez

Senior Researchers

 Michal Piovarči

Michal Piovarči

Michal is a postdoc at IST Austria in the Computer Graphcis and Digital Fabrication group headed by Bernd Bickel. He obtained his PhD at USI Lugano under the supervision of Piotr Didyk in 2020. His thesis, entitled “Perception-Aware Computational Fabrication” received the prestigious Eurographics PhD Award. His research interests are computer graphics, computational fabrication, haptic reproduction, appearance reproduction, and perception.

PhD Students

 Manas Bhargava

Manas Bhargava

Manas joined the PhD programme at ISTA with the cohort of 2019, and he is affiliated with the Bickel Group. Prior to that, he was an undergrad in the Computer Science department at the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay. He is currently working on designing deformable structures.

 Malina Strugaru

Malina Strugaru

Malina is a PhD student at ISTA, co-affiliated with Bernd Bickel and Jérémie Palacci. In her research, she studies the simulation, design, and control of liquid crystalline elastomers.

Alumni

 Hassan Bahrami

Hassan Bahrami

  • Intern   2024
  • PhD Student at UTS as of 2024

Hassan is a PhD student at the University of Technology Sydney (UTS), and is currently visiting ISTA. His research interests are physically-based simulation, geometry processing, and digital fabrication.

 Christine François-Rennhofer

Christine François-Rennhofer

  • Assistant   2023
  • Administrative Assistant at ISTA as of 2023
 Raphaël Charrondière

Raphaël Charrondière

 Martin Hafskjold Thoresen

Martin Hafskjold Thoresen

  • PhD Student   2022
  • Algorithm Engineer at Vind Technologies as of 2023
  • mht.wtf/
 Hao Peng

Hao Peng

Hao was a research intern at IST Austria, advised by Prof. Bernd Bickel.

 Haisen Zhao

Haisen Zhao

Haisen was a postdoc at IST Austria, advised by Prof. Bernd Bickel.

 Eder Miguel

Eder Miguel

I obtained my PhD. in November 2014 at Rey Juan Carlos University under the supervision of Miguel A. Otaduy. I worked on modeling and estimation of hyperelasticity and deformation models. Currently, I focus on physically-based simulation (including data-driven approaches) and its application to computational design and digital fabrication.

 Desmond/Zhenyuan Liu

Desmond/Zhenyuan Liu

Desmond was a research intern at IST Austria, advised by Prof. Bernd Bickel. He graduated from CUHK with a BSc. in Computer Science (first class honors) in July 2021. He will join GCM at EPFL in the fall of 2022, advised by Prof. Dr. Mark Pauly.

 Thomas Auzinger

Thomas Auzinger

  • Postdoc   2020
  • Senior Research Scientist at Google as of 2023
  • auzinger.name/

I obtained my M.Sc. in Physics from the University of Vienna and my PhD. in Computer Graphics from the TU Wien under the supervision of Michael Wimmer. During my doctoral studies, I worked on anti-aliasing and medical visualization. My current research interest is computational fabriction in general and appearance modeling in special.

 Ruslan Guseinov

Ruslan Guseinov

Computational Fabrication

 Ran Zhang

Ran Zhang

  • PhD Student   2020
  • Research Scientist at Tencent Pixel Lab New York as of 2023
  • ran-zhang.com/

Computational Design

 Irene Filoscia

Irene Filoscia

  • Intern   2020
  • Game Programmer at Milestone s.r.l. as of 2023
 Kumar Shivam

Kumar Shivam

  • Intern   2019
  • Lead Engineer at Samsung Electronics as of 2023
 Kazutaka Nakashima

Kazutaka Nakashima

I am a 2nd year master course student in Graduate School of information Science and Technology, The University of Tokyo, Department of Computer Science. My supervisor is Takeo Igarashi, and in IST, I belong to Bernd Bickel group. My research interest is about digital fabrication.

 Jesus Perez Rodriguez

Jesus Perez Rodriguez

 Donald Degraen

Donald Degraen

I’m a PhD student under Prof. Dr. Antonio Krüger in the Ubiquitous Media Technology Lab at the Saarland University (UMTL) and I’m part of the Marie Skłodowska-Curie network (DISTRO). My PhD research investigates the design of haptic feedback for virtual reality.

 Oskar Elek

Oskar Elek

  • Visiting Researcher   2017
  • Researcher and Lecturer at UC Santa Cruz as of 2023
  • elek.pub/
 Gabor Krisztian Birkas

Gabor Krisztian Birkas

  • Intern   2017
  • Senior Software Developer at Unity Technologies as of 2023
 Emmanuel Iarussi

Emmanuel Iarussi

I’ve recently got my Ph.D. at GRAPHDECO team, Inria Sophia Antipolis, France. In 2012 I’ve graduated as a Systems Engineer from UNICEN University, Tandil, Argentina. I’m a former member of ANR DRAO Project, focused on facilitating and accelerating drawing for amateurs, expert designers and illustrators. As a researcher, I’m mostly interested in imaging, fabrication and graphics as well as human-computer interaction techniques for image creation and manipulation.

 Denis Sumin

Denis Sumin

 Charles Rajan

Charles Rajan

  • Intern   2017
  • Software Engineer at Meta as of 2023
 Nikola Bozhinov

Nikola Bozhinov

  • Intern   2015
  • Software Engineer at Google as of 2023

ISTernship, Physics-based Simulations

 Mathias Lepoutre

Mathias Lepoutre

  • Intern   2015
  • Software Engineer at Pearltrees as of 2023

Geometry Processing, Physics-based Simulations

 Luigi Malomo

Luigi Malomo

Computational Design