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

• Feasibility Study for an AI-Driven Coaching System Supporting Long-Term Health Behaviour Change / Deputy project leader / ongoing
• Immersive Education and Science Exploration / Project leader / ongoing
• Surgical Proficiency – Data-driven transformation of surgical education for proficiency-based performance / Project leader / ongoing
• Target Recognition using Artificial Intelligence / Team member / ongoing
• Automated Geospatial Annotation of Historical Photographic Collections / Deputy project leader / completed
• Enhance Your Photo With Interestingness Guided Img2Img Translation / Project leader / completed
• Visual Interestingness - All images are equal but some images are more equal than others / Project leader / completed
• 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. and Grabner, H. (2026) 'Depicting more or less action? How motion density influences user responses in social media marketing', International Journal of Advertising. doi: 10.1080/02650487.2026.2644707.
• Wu, L. et al. (2024) 'A novel augmented reality-based simulator for enhancing orthopedic surgical training', Computers in Biology and Medicine, 185(109536). doi: 10.1016/j.compbiomed.2024.109536.
• Berg, M. et al. (2024) 'distect : automatic sample-position tracking for X-ray experiments using computer vision algorithms', Journal of Synchrotron Radiation. doi: 10.1107/S1600577524009536.
• Bünzli, F. et al. (2024) 'Depicting humans, animals, and objects in motion : the effect of implied motion on engagement and persuasion in advertising', Journal of Advertising. doi: 10.1080/00913367.2024.2393719.
• Te, Y.-F. et al. (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). doi: 10.1016/j.jfds.2023.100099.
• Schmid, N. et al. (2023) 'Deconvolution of 1D NMR spectra : a deep learning-based approach', Journal of Magnetic Resonance, 347(107357). doi: 10.1016/j.jmr.2022.107357.
• Stadelmann, T. et al. (2021) 'The AI-Atlas : didactics for teaching AI and machine learning on-site, online, and hybrid', Education Sciences, 11(7), p. 318. doi: 10.3390/educsci11070318.

Written conference contributions, peer-reviewed

• Ahmed, Z., Gerth, T. and Grabner, H. (2025) 'AI-powered scene generation in VR', in Helin, K., Schiavi, B., and Tsaknaki, E. (eds) EuroXR 2025 : Proceedings of the Application, Poster, and Demo Tracks of the 22nd EuroXR International Conference. VTT, pp. 243–245. doi: 10.32040/2242-122X.2025.T440.
• Gerth, T. et al. (2025) 'SurgiScope : an immersive and interactive platform for surgical training', in 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. VTT, pp. 45–49. doi: 10.32040/2242-122X.2025.T440.
• Abdullahu, F. and Grabner, H. (2025) 'Visual interestingness decoded : how GPT-4o mirrors human interests', in 2023 IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision Proceedings. IEEE.
• Lekar, R. et al. (2025) 'Enhancing orthopedic surgical training with interactive photorealistic 3D visualization', in 25th Annual Meeting of the International Society for Computer Assisted Orthopaedic Surgery (CAOS), Davos, Switzerland, 16-18 June 2025. arXiv. doi: 10.48550/arxiv.2506.13389.
• Abdullahu, F. and Grabner, H. (2025) 'Visual interestingness decoded : how GPT-4o mirrors human interests'. IEEE, pp. 15350–15364. doi: 10.1109/iccv51701.2025.01424.
• Bünzli, F. et al. (2024) 'Do vectors of motion make advertisements more interesting? : the effect of implied motion on interestingness and persuasion', in 74th Annual ICA Conference, Gold Coast, Australia, 20-24 June 2024.
• Abdullahu, F. and Grabner, H. (2024) 'Commonly interesting images', in Leonardis, A. et al. (eds). Cham: Springer, pp. 180–198. doi: 10.1007/978-3-031-73036-8_11.
• Abdullahu, F. and Grabner, H. (2024) 'Commonly interesting images', in 18th European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), Milan, Italy, 29 September - 4 October 2024.
• Te, Y.-F. et al. (2023) 'Mitigating discriminatory biases in success prediction models for venture capitals', in 2023 10th IEEE Swiss Conference on Data Science (SDS). IEEE, pp. 26–33. doi: 10.1109/SDS57534.2023.00011.
• Schmid, N. et al. (2023) 'Deconvolution of NMR spectra : a deep learning-based approach', in Datalab Symposium, Winterthur, Schweiz, 11. Januar 2023. ZHAW Zürcher Hochschule für Angewandte Wissenschaften. doi: 10.21256/zhaw-27429.
• Koller, T. and Grabner, H. (2022) 'Who wants to be a click-millionaire? : on the influence of thumbnails and captions', in 2022 26th International Conference on Pattern Recognition (ICPR). IEEE, pp. 629–635. doi: 10.1109/ICPR56361.2022.9956202.
• Schmid, N. et al. (2022) 'Deconvolution of NMR spectra : a deep learning-based approach', in Prisner, T. (ed.) EUROMAR 2022 Abstractbook. ZHAW Zürcher Hochschule für Angewandte Wissenschaften, p. 242. doi: 10.21256/zhaw-27336.
• Weber, M. et al. (2020) 'Observer dependent lossy image compression', in 42nd German Conference on Pattern Recognition (DAGM-GCPR), virtual, 28 September - 1 October 2020. doi: 10.48550/arXiv.1910.03472.
• Inan, B. et al. (2019) 'Evaluating audiovisual source separation in the context of video conferencing', in Proceedings Interspeech 2019. International Speech Communication Association, pp. 4579–4583. doi: 10.21437/Interspeech.2019-2671.

Other publications

• Lekar, R. et al. (2023) 'AR open surgery training for total hip arthroplasty', in 5th Digital Health Lab Day, Winterthur, Switzerland, 24 August 2023. Winterthur: ZHAW Zürcher Hochschule für Angewandte Wissenschaften. doi: 10.21256/zhaw-29593.
• Bödi, L. H. and Grabner, H. (2020) Learning to ignore : fair and task independent representations. ZHAW Zürcher Hochschule für Angewandte Wissenschaften. doi: 10.21256/zhaw-21602.

Oral conference contributions and abstracts

• Wyss, V. et al. (2026) 'AI personas vs. humans : predicting which images capture common interest', in SGKM-Jahrestagung, Winterthur, Schweiz, 22.-24. April 2026.
• Bünzli, F., Weber, W. and Grabner, H. (2025) 'More motion, more engagement? Implied motion images and user engagement on Instagram', in 90th Annual International Conference of the Association for Business Communication (ABC), online, 27-28 October 2025.
• Lechner, V. et al. (2022) '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', in SGKM-Jahrestagung, Zürich, Schweiz, 21.-22. April 2022.

Publications before appointment at the ZHAW

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