Prof. Dr. Helmut Grabner

Work at ZHAW

Position

• Head of Visual Intelligence and Applications Group
• Head of Entrepreneurship School of Engineering

Focus

• Visual Communication, Extended Reality (XR), Training in simulated and real environments
• Vision meets Art

Teaching

7 Innovators, Visual Computing 1, Visual Computing 2, Machine Learning, Deep Learning

Experience

• Lead Computer Vision Engineer
  Logitech, CTO office
  06 / 2017 - 05 / 2019
• Lead Software Engineer
  Logitech Upicto
  02 / 2015 - 06 / 2017
• CTO & co-founder
  upicto
  05 / 2012 - 01 / 2015
• Post-Doc Researcher
  ETH Zurich
  10 / 2008 - 12 / 2014

Education and Continuing education

Education

• PhD / Computer Science
  Graz University of Technology
  09 / 2004 - 09 / 2008
• Master / Computer Science
  Graz University of Technology
  09 / 1999 - 09 / 2004

Continuing Education

Certificate of Advanced Studies in Higher & Professional Education
Zurich University of Applied Sciences
07 / 2021

Network

Membership of networks

• CV
• My old homepage at ETH Zurich

ORCID digital identifier

ORCID ID: 0000-0003-1377-2686

Awards

Koenderink Prize
European Conference on Computer Vision
09 / 2018

Social media

LinkedIn

Projects

• Immersive Education and Science Exploration / Project leader / ongoing
• Enhance Your Photo With Interestingness Guided Img2Img Translation / Project leader / ongoing
• Visual Interestingness - All images are equal but some images are more equal than others / Project leader / ongoing
• Surgical Proficiency – Data-driven transformation of surgical education for proficiency-based performance / Deputy project leader / ongoing
• Target Recognition using Artificial Intelligence / Team member / ongoing
• Machine Learning-Aided Startup Investing / Project leader / completed
• To be liked or not to be liked – what makes a photo interesting? / Co-project leader / completed
• Towards Explainable Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning in Credit Risk Management / Team member / completed
• UNY id – Person identification based on motion and behavior / Project leader / completed
• Artificial Intelligence to improve venture capital decision making / Project leader / completed
• Intelligent Viticulture / Co-project leader / completed

Publications

Articles in scientific journal, peer-reviewed

• Bünzli, F., Weber, W., & Grabner, H. (2026). Depicting more or less action? How motion density influences user responses in social media marketing. International Journal of Advertising. https://doi.org/10.1080/02650487.2026.2644707
• Wu, L., Seibold, M., Cavalcanti, N. A., Hein, J., Gerth, T., Lekar, R., Hoch, A., Vlachopoulos, L., Grabner, H., Zingg, P., Farshad, M., & Fürnstahl, P. (2024). A novel augmented reality-based simulator for enhancing orthopedic surgical training. Computers in Biology and Medicine, 185(109536). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compbiomed.2024.109536
• Berg, M., Furrer, D., Thominet, V., Wang, X., Zeugin, S., Grabner, H., Stockinger, K., & Piamonteze, C. (2024). distect : automatic sample-position tracking for X-ray experiments using computer vision algorithms. Journal of Synchrotron Radiation. https://doi.org/10.1107/S1600577524009536
• Bünzli, F., Weber, W., Abdullahu, F., & Grabner, H. (2024). Depicting humans, animals, and objects in motion : the effect of implied motion on engagement and persuasion in advertising. Journal of Advertising. https://doi.org/10.1080/00913367.2024.2393719
• Te, Y.-F., Wieland, M., Frey, M., Pyatigorskaya, A., Schiffer, P., & Grabner, H. (2023). Making it into a successful series a funding : an analysis of Crunchbase and LinkedIn data. The Journal of Finance and Data Science, 9(100099). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jfds.2023.100099
• Schmid, N., Bruderer, S., Paruzzo, F., Fischetti, G., Toscano, G., Graf, D., Fey, M., Henrici, A., Ziebart, V., Heitmann, B., Grabner, H., Wegner, J. D., Sigel, R. K. O., & Wilhelm, D. (2023). Deconvolution of 1D NMR spectra : a deep learning-based approach. Journal of Magnetic Resonance, 347(107357). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jmr.2022.107357
• Stadelmann, T., Keuzenkamp, J., Grabner, H., & Würsch, C. (2021). The AI-Atlas : didactics for teaching AI and machine learning on-site, online, and hybrid. Education Sciences, 11(7), 318. https://doi.org/10.3390/educsci11070318

Written conference contributions, peer-reviewed

• Ahmed, Z., Gerth, T., & Grabner, H. (2025). AI-powered scene generation in VR [Conference paper]. In K. Helin, B. Schiavi, & E. Tsaknaki (Eds.), EuroXR 2025 : Proceedings of the Application, Poster, and Demo Tracks of the 22nd EuroXR International Conference (pp. 243–245). VTT. https://doi.org/10.32040/2242-122X.2025.T440
• Gerth, T., Lekar, R., Prokudin, S., Seibold, M., Hoch, A., Tang, S., Fürnstahl, P., & Grabner, H. (2025). SurgiScope : an immersive and interactive platform for surgical training [Conference poster]. EuroXR 2025: Proceedings of the Application, Poster, and Demo Tracks of the 22nd EuroXR International ConferenceEuroXR 2025: Proceedings of the Application, Poster, and Demo Tracks of the 22nd EuroXR International Conference, 440, 45–49. https://doi.org/10.32040/2242-122X.2025.T440
• Abdullahu, F., & Grabner, H. (2025, October). Visual interestingness decoded : how GPT-4o mirrors human interests. 2023 IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision Proceedings.
• Lekar, R., Gerth, T., Prokudin, S., Seibold, M., Bürgin, R., Vella, B., Hoch, A., Tang, S., Fürnstahl, P., & Grabner, H. (2025, June 16). Enhancing orthopedic surgical training with interactive photorealistic 3D visualization. 25th Annual Meeting of the International Society for Computer Assisted Orthopaedic Surgery (CAOS), Davos, Switzerland, 16-18 June 2025. https://doi.org/10.48550/arxiv.2506.13389
• Bünzli, F., Weber, W., Abdullahu, F., & Grabner, H. (2024). Do vectors of motion make advertisements more interesting? : the effect of implied motion on interestingness and persuasion. 74th Annual ICA Conference, Gold Coast, Australia, 20-24 June 2024.
• Abdullahu, F., & Grabner, H. (2024, October). Commonly interesting images. 18th European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), Milan, Italy, 29 September - 4 October 2024.
• Te, Y.-F., Wieland, M., Frey, M., & Grabner, H. (2023). Mitigating discriminatory biases in success prediction models for venture capitals [Conference paper]. 2023 10th IEEE Swiss Conference on Data Science (SDS), 26–33. https://doi.org/10.1109/SDS57534.2023.00011
• Schmid, N., Bruderer, S., Fischetti, G., Paruzzo, F., Toscano, G., Graf, D., Fey, M., Ziebart, V., Henrici, A., Grabner, H., Wegner, J. D., Sigel, R. K. O., Heitmann, B., & Wilhelm, D. (2023, January 11). Deconvolution of NMR spectra : a deep learning-based approach. Datalab Symposium, Winterthur, Schweiz, 11. Januar 2023. https://doi.org/10.21256/zhaw-27429
• Koller, T., & Grabner, H. (2022). Who wants to be a click-millionaire? : on the influence of thumbnails and captions [Conference paper]. 2022 26th International Conference on Pattern Recognition (ICPR), 629–635. https://doi.org/10.1109/ICPR56361.2022.9956202
• Schmid, N., Bruderer, S., Fischetti, G., Paruzzo, F., Toscano, G., Graf, D., Fey, M., Henrici, A., Grabner, H., Wegner, J. D., Sigel, R. K. O., Heitmann, B., & Wilhelm, D. (2022). Deconvolution of NMR spectra : a deep learning-based approach [Conference poster]. In T. Prisner (Ed.), EUROMAR 2022 Abstractbook (p. 242). ZHAW Zürcher Hochschule für Angewandte Wissenschaften. https://doi.org/10.21256/zhaw-27336
• Weber, M., Renggli, C., Grabner, H., & Zhang, C. (2020, October). Observer dependent lossy image compression. 42nd German Conference on Pattern Recognition (DAGM-GCPR), Virtual, 28 September - 1 October 2020. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.1910.03472
• Inan, B., Cernak, M., Grabner, H., Tukuljac, H. P., Pena, R. C. G., & Ricaud, B. (2019). Evaluating audiovisual source separation in the context of video conferencing [Conference paper]. Proceedings Interspeech 2019, 4579–4583. https://doi.org/10.21437/Interspeech.2019-2671

Other publications

• Lekar, R., Wu, L., Gerth, T., Bühler, P., Seibold, M., Fürnstahl, P., & Grabner, H. (2023, August 24). AR open surgery training for total hip arthroplasty. 5th Digital Health Lab Day, Winterthur, Switzerland, 24 August 2023. https://doi.org/10.21256/zhaw-29593
• Bödi, L. H., & Grabner, H. (2020). Learning to ignore : fair and task independent representations. ZHAW Zürcher Hochschule für Angewandte Wissenschaften. https://doi.org/10.21256/zhaw-21602

Oral conference contributions and abstracts

• Bünzli, F., Weber, W., & Grabner, H. (2025, October 27). More motion, more engagement? Implied motion images and user engagement on Instagram. 90th Annual International Conference of the Association for Business Communication (ABC), Online, 27-28 October 2025.
• Lechner, V., Weber, W., Grabner, H., & Obrist, D. (2022, April 22). What makes an image worth a like on Instagram? : a computer vision and visual communication approach to the use of images in corporate and science communication of universities. SACM Annual Conference / SGKM Jahrestagung 2022, Zürich, Schweiz, 21.-22. April 2022.

Publications before appointment at the ZHAW

Google Scholar

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