I am thrilled to share that I have successfully defended my doctoral thesis at the University of Iceland! The defense took place on May 22, 2025 in the main building of the University, marking the culmination of several years of research, collaboration, and innovation in the field of computational plant modeling and data visualization.
My thesis, "Design and evaluation of data analysis and augmentation approaches for functional-structural plant models," focused on embedding plant models into virtual environments to enhance data extraction and synthetic data generation. This work opens new possibilities for phenotyping and machine learning applications in plant science.
Key Contributions
- Developed VRoot, a VR application for intuitive 3D annotation of root systems
- Created Synavis, a pipeline for synthetic data generation using WebRTC and PixelStreaming
- Established methods to validate synthetic plant data for machine learning
- Bridged HPC infrastructure with accessible visualization platforms
I am deeply grateful for the support and guidance of my advisor Morris Riedel, my committee members Ebba Þóra Hvannberg, Hanno Scharr, and Jens Henrik Göbbert, as well as my opponents Michael Pound and Thomas Odaker. Special thanks to Prof. Andrea Schnepf for her collaboration and encouragement throughout this journey. Further collaboration and supervision was provided by Prof. Daniel Zielasko, who oversaw the implementation and evaluation of VRoot.
Looking Forward
With this milestone, I am excited to continue my work as a Research Software Engineer at the Helmholtz-Centre for Environmental Research. I look forward to advancing open science, reproducible research, and developing tools that empower the scientific community.
Thank you to everyone who supported me along the way. For more details, see the official announcement from the University of Iceland.