Marios Papas

Research Area: Neural Rendering

I am currently a Principal Research Scientist at DisneyResearch|Studios and a lecturer at ETH Zurich. I received my PhD from ETH Zurich in 2016 under the supervision of Wojciech Jarosz and Markus Gross. I received my Masters from UC San Diego under Henrik Wann Jensen while funded by a Fulbright scholarship.

As the Rendering Group lead at Disney I have the opportunity to work with a talented team of researchers, engineers and students from Walt Disney Animation Studios, Pixar, Industrial Light and Magic and ETH Zurich. Our research focuses on Monte Carlo rendering problems. Our goal is to understand how light interacts with materials and use that knowledge to design state-of-the-art algorithms and appearance models for efficient and realistic image synthesis. Our current research focuses on using Machine Learning methods for information sharing between samples generated by path tracing algorithms such that we can effectively drive future sampling decisions (adaptive importance sampling) and achieve low-error reconstruction (denoising).

At ETH Zurich together with Markus Gross I help with teaching and organizing the Computer Graphics course in which students learn about geometry representations, Monte Carlo Integration, physically-based rendering algorithms and image-based capture methods. At the end of the course students compete in our annual rendering competition judged by a panel of experts in the field.