PeopleofSuperintelligence

Researcher

Peter Wonka

Peter Wonka is a computer scientist whose research covers deep generative modeling of images, videos and 3D scenes, 3D reconstruction, and 3D vision and language. He earned a PhD in computer science at Vienna University of Technology in 2001, joined Arizona State University in 2004, and won a National Science Foundation CAREER Award in 2006. The SIGGRAPH 2006 paper "Procedural modeling of buildings", coauthored with Pascal Müller and others, introduced the CGA shape grammar. After he moved to King Abdullah University of Science and Technology in 2011, he coauthored Image2StyleGAN in 2019 and 3DShape2VecSet in 2023. He is a Full Professor in the Computer Science Program at KAUST.

Timeline

  1. 1997–2002

    Degrees at Vienna University of Technology

    He earns a master's degree in computer science in 1997, a PhD in computer science in 2001 and a master's degree in urban planning in 2002, all at Vienna University of Technology. His doctoral thesis is "Occlusion Culling for Real-Time Rendering of Urban Environments".

  2. 2004–2011

    Faculty at Arizona State

    After research at UJF Grenoble and a postdoctoral post at the Georgia Institute of Technology, he joins Arizona State University in 2004 as an assistant professor. He then becomes an associate professor there.

  3. 2006

    Procedural modeling of buildings

    He coauthors "Procedural modeling of buildings" with Pascal Müller, Simon Haegler, Andreas Ulmer and Luc Van Gool at SIGGRAPH 2006. The paper presents CGA shape, a shape grammar that produces building shells for games and movies, and uses it to rebuild the archaeological site of Pompeii.

  4. 2006

    An NSF CAREER Award

    He wins a National Science Foundation CAREER Award in 2006, along with a Best Paper Award at VAST.

  5. 2011

    Associate Professor at KAUST

    He joins King Abdullah University of Science and Technology in 2011 as an associate professor of computer science. His KAUST roles include CS Program Chair and Interim Director of the Visual Computing Center.

  6. 2019

    Image2StyleGAN embeddings

    With Rameen Abdal and Yipeng Qin, he coauthors Image2StyleGAN, an algorithm that embeds a given image into the latent space of StyleGAN and enables edits such as image morphing, style transfer and expression transfer. The paper is accepted for oral presentation at ICCV 2019.

  7. 2023

    3DShape2VecSet for diffusion models

    With Biao Zhang, Jiapeng Tang and Matthias Nießner, he coauthors 3DShape2VecSet, a representation that encodes 3D shapes as neural fields on top of a set of vectors for generative diffusion models. The SIGGRAPH 2023 paper demonstrates unconditioned, category-conditioned, text-conditioned and image-conditioned generation, and point-cloud completion.

  8. As of October 2026

    Full Professor at KAUST

    He is a Full Professor in the Computer Science Program at KAUST. His current research focus is deep learning, generative modeling of images, videos and 3D scenes, 3D reconstruction, and 3D vision and language.

Career

  1. Since 2011King Abdullah University of Science and TechnologyAssociate Professor of Computer Science
  2. Until 2004Georgia Institute of TechnologyPostdoctoral Researcher
  3. 2004–2011Arizona State UniversityAssistant Professor, Associate Professor

Education

  1. 2002TU WienMaster's in Urban Planning
  2. 2001TU WienPhD in Computer Science
  3. 1997TU WienMaster's in Computer Science

From the biography.

  1. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology trained or employed 44 of the 187 AI major-prize winners, more than any other universityIncludes Peter Wonka. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology trained or employed 44 of the 187 AI major-prize winners, more than any other university. We compare doctorate and 5+ year employment links, career timing and current workplaces for 187 major-prize and 1,111 best-paper winners.
  2. The United States employs an estimated 48% of people shaping AIIncludes King Abdullah University of Science and Technology. We estimate where the people shaping AI work today, how universities, companies and research institutes split across countries, and how country shares have changed since the 1960s.
  3. More people shaping AI studied at Massachusetts Institute of Technology than at any other institutionIncludes King Abdullah University of Science and Technology. We estimate where the people shaping AI studied and where their careers led. Massachusetts Institute of Technology leads with 467 former students, including 291 recorded doctorates.
  4. The company share of AI researchers’ top papers was 31% in 2020–2024 and 8% in 1970–1974Includes King Abdullah University of Science and Technology. We estimate where the people shaping AI worked when their most-cited papers appeared: the company share was 31% in 2020–2024 and 8% in 1970–1974, and Google led all organizations in 2020–2024.

Colleagues

People named in this biography, and people with dated positions at the same organization in the same years.

Sources and credits

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  1. Peter Wonka | Professor, Computer Science | Computer, Electrical and Mathematical Sciences and Engineering cemse.kaust.edu.sa. Checked 22 October 2026.
  2. Peter Wonka - Wikipedia en.wikipedia.org. Checked 22 October 2026.
  3. "Procedural modeling of buildings" by Müller, Wonka, Haegler, Ulmer and Gool – ACM SIGGRAPH History Archives history.siggraph.org. Checked 22 October 2026.
  4. Image2StyleGAN: How to Embed Images Into the StyleGAN Latent Space? arxiv.org. Checked 22 October 2026.
  5. 3DShape2VecSet: A 3D Shape Representation for Neural Fields and Generative Diffusion Models arxiv.org. Checked 22 October 2026.
  6. Peter Wonka Homepage peterwonka.net. Checked 22 October 2026.