Fernando De la Torre

Expertise

Topics:  Augmented Reality, Computer Vision, Human Sensing, Machine Learning, Virtual Reality

Fernando De la Torre received his B.Sc. degree in Telecommunications, as well as his M.Sc. and Ph. D degrees in Electronic Engineering from La Salle School of Engineering at Ramon Llull University, Barcelona, Spain in 1994, 1996, and 2002, respectively. He has been a research faculty member in the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University since 2005 (currently Research Professor). In 2014 he founded FacioMetrics LLC to license technology for facial image analysis (acquired by Facebook in 2016). His research interests are in the fields of Computer Vision and Machine Learning. In particular, applications to human health, augmented reality, virtual reality, and methods that focus on the data (not the model). He is directing the Human Sensing Laboratory (HSL).

Media Experience

Up close and personal with LiveSplats, a new 3D virtual tech tool developed by CMU team  — TribLive
“You are not going to watch the game — you are going to navigate the game. This is the future of 3D sports,” De la Torre said. “This is how we are going to consume sport in five years. The technology is there, we just need to put it together.” [...] We believe it will be a new way to interact with the game, and navigate the game,” De la Torre said. “We have all the 3D information, we can capture the emotion of a player. We have the 3D representation of the game, so there are many things we can do.”

Wi-Fi signals could prove useful for spies  — The Economist
Starting from this premise Jiaqi Geng, Dong Huang and Fernando De la Torre, of Carnegie Mellon University, in Pittsburgh, wondered if they could use Wi-Fi to record the behaviour of people inside otherwise unobservable rooms. As they describe in a posting on arXiv, they have found that they can. “DensePose from Wi-Fi”, the paper in question, describes how they ran Wi-Fi signals from a room with appropriate routers in it through an artificial-intelligence algorithm trained on signals from people engaging in various, known activities.

Carnegie Mellon Launches New XR Technology Center  — GovTech
"XR technologies will allow us to mix the digital world and the real world in ways that will improve how we work, play, learn, connect and care for ourselves and others," Fernando De La Torre, a co-director of the XRTC and an associate research professor in the Robotics Institute, said in a public statement. "This is happening now. The technology is not yet mature, but the breakthrough is going to happen in the next five to 10 years, and CMU will be there when it happens."