The European Machine Vision Association (EMVA) has named Rolandos Alexandros Potamias recipient of the EMVA Young Professional Award 2025. Potamias, a postdoctoral researcher in 3D computer vision in the Department of Computing at the Imperial College London, earned the award for his work, “High-fidelity 3D Hand Modelling, Detection, and Reconstruction in world-coordinates.” Potamias presented the paper last week at the 23rd EMVA Business Conference. The RMVA Young Professional Award honors the outstanding and innovative work of a student or a young professional in the field of machine vision or image processing. (From left) EMVA board member Petra Thanner, Rolandos Alexandros Potamias, and EMVA president Chris Yates. Courtesy of EMVA Potamias’ paper describes the importance of accurately modeling hands for AR and VR applications as it relates to those that are deaf or hard of hearing, detailing also the shortcomings of how current hand models are trained and constructed. In the work, he developed a large-scale model of a human hand composed of more than 1200 subjects from his research, with the intention of achieving a highly detailed 3D hand reconstruction. Potamias also created a data-driven transformer-based pipeline for efficient and real-time multi-hand detection and 3D reconstruction from in-the-wild images called WiLoR. This coincided with a simultaneous localization and mapping -based hand motion reconstruction model, which he made named HaWoR, that decouples the task of 3D world-coordination hand motion reconstruction by reconstructing the hand motion in the camera space and estimating the camera trajectory in the world coordinate system. The technologies developed from Potamias’ research have received commercial attention for industrial applications ranging from AR and VR and virtual try-on to embodied AI and robot-learning. Potamias holds a master’s degree in engineering from the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering in National Technical University of Athens along with a Ph.D. from Imperial College London. His current research efforts focus on building foundational embodied AI for open-world robots.