Biography
Please visit: http://homepages.cwi.nl/~garcia/Research
Dr. Pablo Cesar leads Distributed and Interactive Systems (DIS) group at CWI and is Professor at TU Delft at the Intelligent Systems (INSY) department of TU Delft. Pablo‘s research focuses on modeling and controlling complex collections of media objects (including real-time media and sensor data) that are distributed in time and space.
Recently, he has received the prestigious 2020 Netherlands Prize for ICT Research because of his work on human-centered multimedia systems. “The jury praises Cesar for his impressive scientific achievements and his ability to communicate his research in an understandable way. Cesar reaches and inspires people inside and outside his field.”
Dr. Cesar’s research focuses on measuring and evaluating the way users interact and communicate with each other using a wide range of decentralized digital systems. His scientific research has been recognized worldwide with nine best paper awards at top venues, and he is a prominent international figure in the field of human-centered multimedia systems. In particular, his more recent work focuses on evaluating quality of experience within immersive media, with a core contribution on multi-party videoconferencing and point cloud compression and delivery. This work was recently adopted within the MPEG and ITU standardization processes. Cesar has (co-)directed 14 externally funded research projects with a total research income of almost €5M. He is co-advisor of five completed PhD students, with four other students currently in process.
The vision behind Dr. Cesar’s work is a future where multimedia systems will be human-centered and thus capable of understanding the user(s) and the environment, providing empathic and highly customized experiences that are immersive and interactive. The research thus focuses on facilitating and improving the way people access media and communicate with others and with the environment, addressing key problems resulting from the dense connectivity of content, people and devices. Cesar’s research combines data science techniques with a strong human-centric, empirical approach to understanding the experiences of users. This enables him to design and develop next generation intelligent and empathic systems. He bases his results on realistic testing grounds and data sets, and embraces areas such as healthcare and wellbeing, education, smart cities, and creative industries.
His mission is to bring core human-computer interaction methodologies to computer science research, and his firm conviction is that for a humane future and for solving tomorrow’s scientific challenges, an interdisciplinary research approach is required. Cesar initiates projects where computer scientists explore problems together with other professionals (sociologists, artists, designers, educators or health professionals, depending on the goal). A combination of expertise provides a plethora of methodologies and approaches that can be applied depending on the problem and the stage of the research (from simulations to field trials, from performance testing to model prediction).
