Nikos Athanasiou
Research Scientist at Flexion Robotics, Zürich · 3D humans, motion and language
I work on understanding and generating human movement — the intricate details of how people move, and how language can be used to describe, generate and control 3D human motion.
Before that I was a Ph.D. student at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems, in the Perceiving Systems department, where I was lucky to be supervised by Michael J. Black and Gül Varol.
Earlier, I did my B.S. & M.Eng. (Diploma) at ECE, NTUA in Athens. Back then I did research on natural language representations at the Speech and Language Processing group under the supervision of Alexandros Potamianos. I also worked for a while at Deeplab, during its early stages, with a wonderful team of people.
News
- Jun 2026 Started as a Research Scientist at Flexion Robotics in Zürich.
- Jun 2026 TrustCLIP got accepted to ECCV 2026.
- Dec 2024 Presented MotionFix at SIGGRAPH Asia 2024 in Japan 🇯🇵.
- Sep 2024 MotionFix got accepted to SIGGRAPH Asia 2024.
- Apr 2024 Started a Research Scientist internship at Meta XR Zürich, working with Buğra Tekin.
- Feb–Apr 2024 Spent two wonderful months in Paris at the ENPC IMAGINE lab as a guest of Gül Varol.
- Mar 2024 WANDR and AMUSE got accepted to CVPR 2024.
- Jan 2024 Gave a talk at Electronic Arts (EA) about my papers TEACH and SINC.
- Jul 2023 SINC got accepted to ICCV 2023.
- Jan 2023 Successfully passed my Qualification Exam (QE) as part of my awesome PhD program (CS@maxplanck).
- Aug 2022 TEACH got accepted to 3DV 2022.
- Mar 2021 BABEL got accepted to CVPR 2021.
- Mar 2020 VIBE got accepted to CVPR 2020.
Research
My research aims to understand the intricate details of human movement and to generate fine-grained 3D human motions. I am interested in 3D humans and their interactions with other humans and with their environment.
I like working with video, and ideally I want to use every kind of data available to train big models. I am also really interested in exploiting large VLMs and LLMs in smart ways to synthesize data and build on top of them.
Publications
Full list also on Google Scholar.
2026
2024
2023
2021
2020
2019
2018
Thesis
Contact
You can reach me by email at athn.nik@gmail.com. I strongly prefer email. I am rarely active and almost never keep up with messages on X/Twitter 🐤 or LinkedIn 💼. However, I try to reply to all my emails and will probably solve your issues 👾.
Except if you have an issue related to conda. That one you have to solve on your own, or seek professional help. The last two sentences are a joke.