Dr. Matthias Nießner is a Professor at the Technical University of Munich, where he leads the Visual Computing & AI Lab. Before, he was a Visiting Assistant Professor at Stanford University. Prof. Nießner’s research lies at the intersection of computer vision, graphics, and machine learning, where he is particularly interested in cutting-edge techniques for 3D generative AI, AI-driven video synthesis, spatial AI, and photorealistic AI Avatars. In total, he has published over 300 academic publications, including 102 works at the leading vision conferences (CVPR, ECCV, ICCV) as well as 34 works at the premier venues in computer graphics (SIGGRAPH / SIGGRAPH Asia / ToG); several of these works won best paper awards, including at SIGCHI’14, HPG’15, SPG’18, and the SIGGRAPH’16 Emerging Technologies Award for the best Live Demo. Prof. Nießner’s work enjoys wide media coverage, with many articles featured in main-stream media including the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Spiegel, MIT Technological Review, and many more, and his was work led to several TV appearances such as on Jimmy Kimmel Live, where Prof. Nießner demonstrated the popular Face2Face technique; Prof. Nießner’s academic Youtube channel currently has over 5 million views and on Twitter over 40,000 people follow him.

For his work, Prof. Nießner received several awards: he is a TUM-IAS Rudolph Moessbauer Fellow (2017 – ongoing), he won the Google Faculty Award for Machine Perception (2017), the Nvidia Professor Partnership Award (2018), as well as the prestigious ERC Starting Grant 2018 which comes with 1.5 million Euro in research funding; in 2019, he received the Eurographics Young Researcher Award honoring the best upcoming graphics researcher in Europe, and in 2025 he was awarded the ERC Consolidator Grant which comes with 2.75 million Euro in funding. In addition to his academic impact, Prof. Nießner is a co-founder of Synthesia Inc., a unicorn startup dedicated to democratize synthetic media generation with cutting-edge AI-driven video synthesis technology. Prof. Nießner is also co-founder and CEO of SpAItial AI, a brand-new venture that is at the forefront of generative AI and Spatial Foundation Models. Their goal is bridge the gap between the digital and physical world with a new paradigm of world models.