Irene Viola
QoE AND MULTIMEDIA
RESEARCHER
I am a senior (tenured) researcher at Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica. My interests lie in multimedia compression, transmission, and quality evaluation. My research is currently focused on Quality of Experience (QoE) metrics and methodologies for immersive multimedia systems (i.e., volumetric video for XR applications).
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A recorded talk about my research, given for the 75th anniversary of CWI, is available here.
News
[22/01/2025] Our demo "Fashion Beneath the Skin - a Fashion Exhibition Experience in Social Virtual Reality" was accepted in IEEE VR 2025.
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[17/01/2025] Our paper "Comparison of Visual Saliency for Dynamic Point Cloud: Task-free vs. Task-dependent" was accepted for publication in IEEE Transactions in Visualization and Computer Graphics, and will be presented in IEEE VR 2025.
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[16/01/2025] Our paper "PointPCA+: A Full-Reference Point Cloud Quality Assessment Metric with PCA-based Features" was accepted for publication in Elsevier Signal Processing: Image Communication.​​
Work Experience
April 2024 - Today
Senior (tenured) researcher at Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica (CWI)
Distributed and Interactive Systems (DIS)
October 2020 - April 2024
Tenure-track researcher at Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica (CWI)
Distributed and Interactive Systems (DIS)
August 2019 - September 2020
Postdoctoral researcher at Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica (CWI)
Distributed and Interactive Systems (DIS)
May 2019 - July 2019
Postdoctoral researcher at École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL)
Multimedia Signal Processing Group (MMSPG)
June 2018 - August 2018
Visiting researcher at Nagoya University
Hosted by Prof. Toshiaki Fujii
September 2015 - April 2019
Doctoral candidate at École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL)
Multimedia Signal Processing Group (MMSPG)
Education
September 2015 - April 2019
École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL)
PhD in Electrical and Electronic Engineering
Thesis: Compression and visual quality assessment for light field contents
Advisor: Prof. Touradj Ebrahimi
September 2013 - October 2015
Polytechnic University of Turin/EPFL
MSc in Computer Engineering
Thesis: A dataset for image super-resolution
Advisors: Prof. Martin Vetterli, Prof. Enrico Magli
September 2010 - July 2013
Polytechnic University of Turin
BSc in Cinema and Media Engineering
Projects
November 2024
AMPLIFY (Horizon Europe)
AMPLIFY is a consortium of artists, technologists, and researchers from 8 European countries dedicated to facilitating the digital transition in the Cultural and Creative Industries (CCIs). AMPLIFY will develop, test, and pilot two innovative suites of digital technologies empowered by AI and XR for CCIs, based on a human-centric approach that balances the tools and their use, so that the whole project delivers not only innovative technologies, new ways of working, and enhanced audience experiences, but also sustainable economic models consistent with the beliefs, values, and practices of the creators and audiences for wider societal benefit
September 2024 - present
OPEN-DASH-PC (SPIRIT Open Call)
OPEN-DASH-PC tackles the limitations of current real-time, multi-user immersive communication protocols, which face scalability issues and require complex central server algorithms. We propose Ultra Low Latency Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP for Point Cloud content (ULL-DASH-PC). This open-source transport protocol enables efficient, multi-quality, multi-user communication through point cloud data. By advancing the state of immersive communication, OPEN-DASH-PC will support both academic and industrial innovation.
January 2024 - present
INDUX-R (Horizon Europe)
INDUX-R envisions a human-centric XR ecosystem that will transform European industrial sectors by empowering humans and creating innovative XR products and services of significant added value. It targets concrete scientific breakthroughs integrated into technological enablers that will be applied in use cases driven by real-life needs while having the potential to be replicated in several other applications. These breakthroughs are focused on core XR technologies, namely, digitization and creation of XR assets, realistic animation, light-field HMDs, XR media streaming, and egocentric perception. To address the challenges that multi-user XR applications pose, INDUX-R will implement a highly scalable, zero-touch 5G architecture and a secure, interoperable IoT network that can accommodate fluctuating demands and minimize waste of resources.
October 2022 - present
TransMIXR (Horizon Europe)
The mission of TransMIXR is to introduce leading-edge technologies and experiences built around public values: to inform & entertain, to connect & inspire, to educate and empower. Its ambition is to strengthen the democratic mission and competitiveness of the European Cultural and Creative Sector with intelligent AI and XR technologies that are user-centric, transparent, trustworthy, inclusive, and accountable.
October 2022 - present
VOXReality (Horizon Europe)
VOXReality is an ambitious project whose goal will be to facilitate and exploit the convergence of two important technologies, natural language processing (NLP) and computer vision (CV). Vision systems drive both AR and VR, while language understanding adds a natural way for humans to interact with the backends of XR systems, or create multi-modal XR experiences combining vision and sound.
September 2021 - present
NWO WISE
The project focuses on on designing and integrating novel algorithms to improve compression and transmission efficiency of immersive media contents through Quality of Experience (QoE) optimization.