Pablo Cesar

Pablo Cesar leads the Distributed and Interactive Systems (DIS) group at CWI and is Professor of Human-Centered Multimedia Systems at TU Delft. He received the prestigious 2020 Netherlands Prize for ICT Research. He is IEEE Senior and ACM Distinguished Member. His research focuses on measuring and evaluating the way users interact and communicate with each other using a wide range of decentralized digital systems. Cesar has co-directed around 20 externally funded research projects (H2020, FP7, FP6, PPP, NWO) and received over ten best paper awards at top conferences. He is in the steering committee of the ACM IMX, MMsys, and CHI conferences; and in the executive committee of ACM SIGMM. He is TPC co-chair of ACM CHI2026, and was general co-chair of ACM IMX 2020 and MMsys 2018. He serves as well in the editorial board of the ACM Transactions on Multimedia (TOMM).

The vision behind his 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. His 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. It 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.

His mission is to bring core human-computer interaction methodologies to computer science research, for ensuring a humane future. The hypothesis is that for solving tomorrow’s scientific challenges, an inter-disciplinary research approach is required. He is not afraid to break existing boundaries between disciplines. Silos are good for profiling researchers, but artificially restrict the actual impact of the work. He believes in a more holistic approach, where computer scientists explore existing problems together with other professionals. 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). The recognition of such rich toolset is, in his opinion, the truly differentiating factor of the leaders of tomorrow. Examples of such inter-disciplinary research include a number of EU-funded projects such as TRACTION (Opera), TRANSMIXR (cultural and creative sector), 5D Culture (cultural heritage), and Amplify (music).

Pablo has co-authored over 100 journal and conference articles in top venues (ACM TOMM, IEEE TMM, ACM MM, ACM CHI…), co-edited two books on Media Synchronization and Social Interactive Television, and co-organized a Dagstuhl seminar on Social XR. He has been involved in the development of several open-source software packages for enabling object-based media production, helping running QoE tests with users, and designing, implementing and evaluating point cloud compression algorithms. The latter, which started back in 2010, has resulted in high-impact publications and several PhD thesis. More recently, the group has extended this work and provides as open source a whole volumetric video conferencing infrastructure, called VR2Gather, for others to develop their own applications and experiences.

https://www.pablocesar.me

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• Social Extended Reality: Using Volumetric Video for Remote Communication and Collaboration

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