Short Bio of Gabriel Zachmann

Dr. Gabriel Zachmann is professor for computer graphics at Clausthal University, Germany, since 2005, and head of the Computer Graphics Group in the Computer Science Department. Prior to that, he was assistant professor with Prof. Reinhard Klein's computer graphics group at Bonn University, Germany, and head of the research group (Nachwuchsgruppe) for novel interaction methods in virtual prototyping, which was funded by the DFG within the Emmy-Noether programme ("Aktionsplan Informatik").

In 2000, Dr. Zachmann received a PhD in computer science, and in 1994 a Dipl.-Inform (MSc), both from Darmstadt University. He worked on his Diploma thesis during a half-year visit to the National enter for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) in Urbana-Champaign, Illinois. He began his studies of computer science at Karlsruhe University.

From 1994 until 2001, he was with the Virtual Reality group at the Fraunhofer Institute for Computer Graphics in Darmstadt, where he carried out many industrial projects in the area of virtual prototyping. He also helped found a spin-off (VRCom) that maintains and further develops the VR-System, of which Dr. Zachmann was one of the principal architects during these years. Overall, he was one of the pioneers in Europe who helped develop first Virtual Reality applications for the automotive manufacturing domain.

In 2010, Prof. Zachmann became a Visiting Professor with the Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. From 2009 through 2014, he also served on the board of experts of the "Innovationsallianz Virtuelle Techniken (IA VT)", which was established by the German Ministry for Education and Research (BMBF) within its IKT 2020 framework. Dr. Zachmann's research interests include geometric algorithms for computer graphics, in particular collision detection and related topics, virtual prototyping, virtual reality in general, computer vision based hand tracking, immersive visualization, virtual cities, and others.

Zachmann has published many papers at international conferences in areas like collision detection, virtual prototyping, intuitive interaction, mesh processing, and camera-based hand tracking. He has also served on numerous program committees, as a reviewer for journals, conferences, and publishers, as an expert for funding bodies, and as a referee for many PhDs.

Each year, Prof. Zachmann serves on many international program committees and contributes actively to the organization of conferences such as IEEE VR and VisWeek. He also served as expert reviewer for the EU to monitor an FP6 project, and as a member of the review panel "Information and Communication Technologies" for the Cyprus Research Promotion Foundation (RPF). Of course, he has also served as a reviewer for the DFG (German Research Foundation), the Investitions- und Strukturbank Rheinland-Pfalz (ISB), and as an external reviewer on various PhD promotions.

Gabriel Zachmann
Last modified: Tue Jan 31 12:22:38 MET 2012