I am a researcher working on machine learning models for non-verbal behavior generation, such as hand gestures and facial expressions. My favorite project, the GENEA Initiative, can be found on this website. My PhD thesis is publicly available at this url.
I come from Ukraine and my country has been invaded by Russia causing lots of suffering to the people. If you want to help - you can find many ways to do that in this website.
Awards
- May 2023: CVPR 2023 Outstanding Reviewer Award!
- Oct 2021: ICMI 2021 Best Reviewer Award!
- Sept 2021: Our paper Speech2Properties2Gestures received Honourable Mention award at IVA 2021.
- Oct 2020: Gesticulator got the ICMI 2020 Best Paper Award!
- Oct 2020: Let's face it received the IVA 2020 Best Paper Award!
- May 2020: We received Honourable Mention award at Eurographics 2020 for our paper Style-Controllable Speech-Driven Gesture Synthesis Using Normalising Flows.
Recent News
- May 2026: Left Electronic Arts (SEED) after 4 years as a Research Scientist.
- Mar 2026: Our paper Towards Reliable Human Evaluations in Gesture Generation was accepted at CVPR 2026 Findings!
- Feb 2026: Our GENEA Workshop 2026 on Generation and Evaluation of Non-verbal Behaviour for Embodied Agents has been accepted at ICMI 2026!
- Oct 2025: We launch the GENEA Leaderboard, the first online living benchmark for evaluating and comparing speech-driven gesture generation models
- Aug 2025: My first paper about my work for EA, Evaluating the evaluators: Towards human-aligned metrics for missing markers reconstruction, was accepted at the ACM International Conference on Multimedia 2025 (ACM MM'25)
- May 2024: Thrilled to announce the publication of our paper on the second GENEA Challenge in ACM Transactions on Graphics (TOG)! Joint work with Pieter Wolfert, Youngwoo Yoon, Carla Viegas, Teodor Nikolov, Mihail Tsakov and Gustav Eje Henter
- Feb 2023: Our paper A Comprehensive Review of Data-Driven Co-Speech Gesture Generation was accepted at EuroGraphics 2023.
- Feb 2023: GENEA Challenge 2023 was accepted at ICMI 2023 as a Multimodal Grand Challenge.
- Nov 2022: Our paper The GENEA Challenge 2022: A large evaluation of data-driven co-speech gesture generation was published at ICMI 2022.
- Nov 2022: GENEA challenge and a workshop are presented at ICMI 2022. Here are their websites: the GENEA Challenge 2022 and the GENEA Workshop 2022.
- July 2022: Our paper Evaluating Data-Driven Co-Speech Gestures of Embodied Conversational Agents through Real-Time Interaction was accepted at IVA 2022.
- May 2022: Our paper Multimodal analysis of the predictability of hand-gesture properties was published at AAMAS 2022.
- Mar 2022: A challenge and a workshop accepted at ICMI 2022: the GENEA Challenge 2022 and the GENEA Workshop 2022.
- Feb 2022: I joined EA Games R&D department, called SEED, as research engineer.
Older News (2017 – 2021)
- Dec 2021: Our paper Multimodal analysis of the predictability of hand-gesture properties was accepted to AAMAS 2022.
- Dec 2021: I defended my thesis. My opponent was Stefan Kopp and you can find more info under this link
- Nov 2021 I gave two talks about my research on co-speech gesture synthesis: for SAIR Lab at King's College London and for Affective Intelligence and Robotics Laboratory at Cambridge University
- Oct 2021: Our GENEA Workshop 2021 is happening at ICMI 2021. Workshop page
- Sept 2021: Started an internship at Microsoft Research UK Applied Research team
- July 2021: Two papers accepted at ICMI 2021: HEMVIP and To Rate or Not To Rate.
- June 2021: Our paper Speech2Properties2Gestures was accepted to IVA 2021.
- Mar 2021: Our GENEA Workshop 2021 has been accepted at ICMI 2021. Call for papers is out!
- Feb 2021: Our demonstrator A Framework for Integrating Gesture Generation Models into Interactive Conversational Agents was accepted to AAMAS 2021.
- Feb 2021: Synced wrote an article about Gesticulator.
- Jan 2021: Our paper Moving fast and slow got accepted to the International Journal of Human-Computer Interaction.
- Dec 2020: Our paper The GENEA Challenge 2020 was accepted to IUI 2021.
- Oct 2020: I gave a talk about gesture generation for the Talking Robotics seminar series.
- Sept 2020: One more paper accepted to IVA 2020: Let's face it.
- Aug 2020: Our paper Gesticulator got accepted to ICMI 2020!
- July 2020: Two papers accepted for IVA 2020.
- April 2020: CFP for our IVA'20 Workshop on Generation and Evaluation of Non-verbal Behaviour for Embodied Agents is out.
- Feb 2020: Our paper Style-Controllable Speech-Driven Gesture Synthesis Using Normalising Flows was accepted to Eurographics 2020.
- November 2019: Talk on general direction of my research.
- September 2019 Talk on How to make your agent gesture in a natural way at Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems.
- August 2019: Our gesture generation model was applied to a new dataset. Check out a short demo video and our code.
- June 2019: Two papers accepted for ICDL-EPIROB 2019 Workshop.
- April 2019: Our paper Analyzing input and output representations for speech-driven gesture generation was accepted to IVA 2019.
- Jan 2019: Our paper On the importance of representations for speech-driven gesture generation was accepted at AAMAS 2019.
- Oct 2018: My project proposal was published at ICMI Doctoral Consortium 2018.
- June 2017: We had a poster at The First Swedish Symposium on Deep Learning.
Academic Service
Co-organizing
- ICMI'26 Workshop on Generation and Evaluation of Non-verbal Behaviour for Embodied Agents
- ACM MM'25 Workshop on Generation and Evaluation of Non-verbal Behaviour for Embodied Agents
- ICMI'24 Workshop on Generation and Evaluation of Non-verbal Behaviour for Embodied Agents
- ICMI'23 Workshop on Generation and Evaluation of Non-verbal Behaviour for Embodied Agents
- ICMI'22 Workshop on Generation and Evaluation of Non-verbal Behaviour for Embodied Agents
- ICMI'21 Workshop on Generation and Evaluation of Non-verbal Behaviour for Embodied Agents
- IVA'20 Workshop on Generation and Evaluation of Non-verbal Behaviour for Embodied Agents
- GESPIN 2020 Conference
- SoRoS 2020 Workshop
- NIPS 2018 Workshop on AI for Social Good
Reviewer
- 2023: FG, IEEE VR, EuroGraphics, CVPR, SIGGRAPH, ACII, IVA, SIGGRAPH Asia
- 2022: HRI, CHI, CVPR, AISTATS, IVA, ICMI, SIGGRAPH Asia
- 2021: ACII, ICMI, ROMAN, ICCV Workshops
- 2020: ECAI, IJCAI, SIGGRAPH, IVA, ICMI LBR
- 2019: ACII, ICSR
- 2018: NIPS Workshop on AI for Social Good