Paolo was a guest researcher from the University of Bologna with Center for Sensor Systems (ZESS) at the University of Siegen. Usually, Paolo tackles problems of shape matching and neural network training: Shape matching aims to determine how two geometric objects correspond to each other, even under strong non-rigid deformations, as in matching a hippopotamus to a giraffe and training neural networks becomes especially difficult when the loss landscape is highly non-convex—meaning it’s full of hills, valleys, and flat regions that make it hard for the usual learning procedure to reliably point the model in the right direction.

With me, he tackled portrait photography, which involved the movement of strong, rigid formations (ie furniture). It became particularly difficult as the landscape in the room we used made it hard to allow the model to stand where one could both see the projection of his beautifully handwritten formulae behind him but not being hit by the light from the projector. So in the end we both kneeled on tables in less than comfortable positions…

Best wishes Paolo and thanks for putting up with my requests, I enjoyed working with you a lot!

[Staff work for Center for Sensor Systems, University of Siegen]