Hanno Basse, CTO, Digital Domain

Hanno Basse is an industry expert with over three decades of experience. He is currently the Chief Technology Officer at Digital Domain where he focuses on driving innovation and spearheading research and development initiatives. Hanno is responsible for leading Digital Domain's technical infrastructure, empowering artists to create award-winning content across all mediums, and fostering a culture of innovation within the organization.Previously, Hanno served as the CTO of Microsoft Azure Media and Entertainment where he revolutionized content production workflows by leveraging Azure cloud, edge, and AI technologies. Before that, he worked at 20th Century Fox Film Corp where he pioneered next-gen entertainment technology such as HDR and Ultra-HD. He also played a pivotal role in the HD transition and pioneered video-on-demand infrastructure at DirecTV.Hanno is an accomplished member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and a Fellow of the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers. He holds 30 patents and has made significant contributions to various corporations.

Isaac Bratzel, Founder & CEO, AvatarOS

Digital humans are evolving. Isaac Bratzel is at the forefront of that evolution driving a wave of innovation and altering their very DNA. More than a decade ago Isaac helped create Amelia.ai, a conversational AI with a digital human face, and then went on to establish the virtual social media phenomenon Lil Miquela. 

Today, Isaac is bringing his expertise in AI and digital humans together in a new venture, AvatarOS, the startup backed by A16Z and Nvidia, that he founded to power interactive and authentic digital humans that reach the quality of real life and scale like software.

Dan Ring, Senior ML Team Lead, Chaos

Dan Ring, with over 15 years in creative software development, is dedicated to revolutionizing content production through applied research. As the Senior ML Team Lead at Chaos, and former Head of Research at Foundry, Dan harnesses technologies such as AI and Virtual Production to empower creatives in storytelling and decision-making.

Dan’s work has been recognised in several publications and blogs, including 3D World, befores & afters, fxguide, Digital Arts and more. His work on planar tracking was nominated for a Scientific & Technical (SciTech) Academy Award. 

Dan was a member of the Sigmedia Research group in Trinity College Dublin and received his PhD in image processing in 2008. During that time his research focused on solving matting problems, sparse feature tracking and automatic parsing and analysis of sports and medical footage. 

Mike Seymour, Co-Founder, FXGuide

Mike has a Ph.D in digital humans built on a B Sc. in Pure Maths from the University of Sydney where he also did his Masters. His research is into using interactive realtime photoreal faces in new forms of Human Computer Interfaces (CHI). Mike has worked in R&D and in production, winning an AFI and being nominated for an Emmy. He has worked as a compositor, vfx supervisor and second unit director on various TV shows. He is perhaps best known for his work as a writer, consultant and educator with the web sites fxguide and fxphd. Now with huge followings, these sites provide an important link between the film and vfx community and the researchers and innovators who constantly push the limits of technology.Mike has lectured at SIGGRAPH, HICSS, FMX, CVMP and SMPTE.  Mike co-founded the Motus Lab at the University of Sydney with explores digital humans using both traditional high end computer graphics and also advanced neural rendering and Machine Learning.