As of Jan. 1, 2021, Katja Bühler will set the course for the future of VRVis - she will take over as scientific director of the VRVis Center for Virtual Reality and Visualization. The Vienna COMET Center of Excellence has existed for over 20 years and is Austria's leading non-university research institution in the field of visual computing. "With Katja Bühler, we have gained a strong scientific director from within our own ranks who is both firmly anchored in the international research landscape and speaks the language of industry," says Dr. Gerd Hesina, Managing Director of VRVis.
Katja Bühler looks back on a large number of basic and applied research projects with renowned international scientific and corporate partners. As head of the "Complex Systems" division and the "Biomedical Image Informatics" research group, she introduced several new research fields at VRVis, such as biomedical image processing, visual computing for life sciences, and artificial intelligence for visual computing, which are successfully implemented together with VRVis partners.
One of their main focuses will be the even stronger networking of the eight research groups and the international partners of VRVis: "Future-oriented research solves complex problems by using synergies across many disciplines. This interdisciplinary approach to our computer science research is one of the unique selling points of VRVis, which I want to further strengthen in the coming years." Katja Bühler will also focus on expanding in-house AI research in order to pursue the topics of Human-centered AI, Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI), and the important connection between visual computing and artificial intelligence even more strongly in the future together with partners from industry and business. "Building on the excellent work of Werner Purgathofer, I look forward to continuing to pave the way for cutting-edge research and future-oriented solutions together with the researchers at VRVis and our partners, thereby strengthening Austria as a research and industrial location," says Katja Bühler.
About the person
Katja Bühler (51) studied mathematics at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology. After a research stay at the Universidad Central de Venezuela, she moved to Austria, where she earned a doctorate in computer science at the Vienna University of Technology and worked as a university assistant. In 2002, she moved to VRVis as a senior researcher and in 2003 she became head of the Biomedical Image Informatics group, with research interests in Visual Computing, Image Processing, Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning, and Data Science for Big Data Driven Research. Katja Bühler is regularly engaged by the European Union and international funding organizations as a technical and scientific expert, is a board member of the Austrian Bioimaging / CMI consortium and co-editor of well-known journals. She has received several awards for her research work, for example the science2business Award or most recently the prestigious TU Women's Award 2020.
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