Dr. Tyler Bell is an Assistant Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Iowa and the Director of the Holo Reality Lab. He received his B.S. and M.S. from Iowa State University in Computer Science and Human Computer Interaction, respectively. His Ph.D. is in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Purdue University. Prof. Bell’s research lies at the intersection of the physical and virtual worlds where he conducts research in the areas of 3D video streaming and telepresence, virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR), and human computer interaction (HCI). A major achievement of his work includes the development of innovative platforms for real-time, compressed 3D video streaming over standard wireless networks for immersive visualization on a diverse range of devices, including desktop and mobile devices, holographic displays, and VR/AR systems. In addition, Dr. Bell’s research explores the practical applications of artificial intelligence (AI), employing AI to devise novel methods of 3D data compression and to enable realistic simulations with virtual human avatars. In this talk, Dr. Bell will introduce his lab’s research in achieving 3D video streaming for telepresence and entertainment. He will also introduce how 3D imaging is being utilized to improve navigation capabilities for people with low vision.

Douglas Cole is a Machine Learning Engineering Manager at Spotify and leads a team that builds content understanding and personalized recommendation models for podcasts and audiobooks. His team specializes in putting state of the art language and recommendation models into production systems that can scale to 500 million users and hundreds of millions of podcast episodes in near real time. Prior to Spotify, he worked on Amazon Alexa’s Natural Language Understanding team, starting as a computational linguist who implemented new functionality and engineered features for the classification models. Later he led a team that maintained the functionality of Alexa’s highest traffic domain. Douglas has a PhD and MA in linguistics from the University of Iowa, and a BA in Business from the University of Northern Iowa. His research interests are focused on using language modeling to solve a variety of business problems and implementing ML solutions at scale.