Tomas Trescak

Biography

Tomas’s research flows through several realities, virtual, augmented and the real one, seeking new ways with Artificial Intelligence to facilitate complex cognitive tasks in simulation, education, health care, cyber security and social sciences.

The raise of Artificial Intelligence and machine learning launched a new industrial revolution, changing ways we perform our routine tasks on daily basis. This revolution is attributed to the immense computational power we control and the vast amount of data that we generate, allowing AI to learn from it and apply on its own goals. Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR) became one of the major players in this revolution, estimating $100 billion revenue on VR/AR products by 2021.

Surprisingly, the crucial connection between AR/VR and AI is currently very weak. Both technologies being very demanding on resources, renders most AI applications impossible to use in AR/VR. Therefore, we need to seek new ways, empowering our tasks with visual power of mixed realities with help from Artificial Intelligence to reduce our cognitive overload and help with decision making in high-stress situations such as cyber security, space exploration, data analytics, healthcare, simulations and much more.

Dr. Tomas Trescak holds a PhD title in Computer Science with specialisation in artificial intelligence from Artificial Intelligence Research Institute, Barcelona, Spain (IIIA) of the Spanish Research Council (CSIC). Since May 2013, he works at Western Sydney University, where in 2016 he incorporated as Lecturer.

The topics of his research concern mixed realities, machine learning, interactive virtual, intelligent virtual agents, crowd simulations and computational creativity techniques, such as shape grammars. Dr. Trescak’s main contribution is in facilitation of creation and execution of self-adaptable, interactive normative 3D environments and their subsequent application to the fields of agent-based simulation.

During his research, he has developed several techniques and methods and implemented them in the set of open-source tools, used world-wide. These works were published in acclaimed international conferences and journals. Tomas is also multi-awarder researcher and academic, among others receiving in 2015 a Digital Disruptor Award, a gold medal for the best higher education educator by Australian Computer Society, or the Best Innovator award by Unearthed association.