Victor Perez, Visual Effects Supervisor
The Beauty of Imperfection: Human Craft in the Age of AI

As AI makes visual beauty instantly accessible, cinema enters a new creative era where production value and artistic value begin to separate. When images can be generated by anyone, the central question is no longer what can be shown, but why it should be shown, and, just as importantly, what should remain unseen. This talk explores how AI is shifting visual storytelling beyond spectacle and technical achievement toward meaning, authorship, restraint, and human imperfection. With a focus on cinematography and visual effects, it argues that the future of the image will not be defined by flawless beauty, but by craft: the deliberate act of shaping, selecting, withholding, and piecing beauty together into emotional and narrative meaning. Maybe we needed AI to remind us what makes us human.

Victor Perez is a renowned figure in the global visual effects industry. His career spans over 28 years so far, and he has worked in many areas of visual storytelling. Starting as a photographer and cinematographer, extending his interest to the whole image post-production process and evolving into a visual effects artist with a special focus on photorealistic compositing of CGI. Along the way, he has worked on a number of Hollywood films, including Christopher Nolan’s ‘The Dark Knight Rises’, ‘Rogue One: A Star Wars Story’, ‘Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows’, and ‘Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides’, plus many more. Eventually, he became a Film Director, and his career naturally led him to his current role as a Visual Effects Supervisor. What really drives Perez is his focus on storytelling. He is fascinated by how new technologies can help filmmakers tell stories in ways never seen before. His work is a fine alchemy of Science, Technology, and Art, reflecting his passion for innovation and creativity.

George Drettakis, Inria
Title TBA

George Drettakis graduated in Computer Science (CS) in Crete, Greece, obtained an M.Sc. and a Ph.D. (1994) in CS at the University of Toronto, Canada, under the supervision of Eugene Fiume, followed by an ERCIM postdoc in Grenoble, Barcelona and Bonn (94-95). He obtained an Inria researcher position in the iMAGIS group in Grenoble (1995), and the degree of “Habilitation” at the University of Grenoble (1999). In 2000 he founded the REVES research group at INRIA Sophia-Antipolis (2002-2015), followed by the current GRAPHDECO group. He has received several awards: the Eurographics (EG) Outstanding Technical Contributions award in 2007, EG Distinguished Career Award (2024), Inria-French Academy of Sciences Grand Prix (2024), the ACM SIGGRAPH Computer Graphics Achievement Award (2025), and was named EG (2007) and ACM Fellow (2026). He was papers co-chair of the EG Rendering Workshop in 1998, EG conference in 2002 and 2008, technical papers chair of SIGGRAPH Asia 2010, associate editor for major graphics journals, and chairs the EG working group on Rendering. His research spans many topics in computer graphics, with an emphasis on rendering. He initially concentrated on lighting and shadow computation and subsequently worked on 3D audio, perceptually-driven algorithms, virtual reality and 3D interaction. In recent years he has focused more on learning-based appearance capture, relighting and novel view synthesis (previously known as image-based rendering), culminating in the development of 3D Gaussian Splatting.

Niloy Mitra, University College London and Adobe Research
Neurosymbolic Structure for Controllable Visual Media

Niloy J. Mitra leads the Smart Geometry Processing group in the Department of Computer Science at University College London and the Adobe Research London Lab. He received his Ph.D. from Stanford University under the guidance of Leonidas Guibas. His research develops machine learning frameworks for generating high-quality geometric and functional content in computer graphics applications. He has received several recognitions, including the ACM SIGGRAPH Significant New Researcher Award (2013), the BCS Roger Needham Award (2015), and the Eurographics Outstanding Technical Contributions Award (2019). He was elected a Eurographics Fellow in 2021, served as Technical Papers Chair for SIGGRAPH in 2022, and was inducted into the SIGGRAPH Academy in 2023. Beyond research, Niloy is an avid DIYer and enjoys reading, cricket, and cooking. More information is available at https://geometry.cs.ucl.ac.uk.

Robin Kahlow, Runway
Simulating the Stack

Every pipeline that produces images, sound or interactive experiences is built from layers of explicit systems. Drawing on Runway’s research into world models and real-time simulation, this keynote maps which of those layers learned simulation can handle today, where explicit systems still hold and what comes next.

Robin Kahlow is a Principal Research Scientist at Runway, building the real-time technology behind Runway Characters, Solaris and GWM Worlds, which generate conversational characters, interactive interfaces and explorable worlds. He led the research on Gen-Turbo, which brought high-quality video generation down from minutes to seconds, and helped build Runway’s Gen series of image and video models, from pretraining to inference optimization.