Ming C. Lin
Talk title
Fast Simulation of Complex Phenomena Using Hybrid Models
Abstract
From turbulent fluid flow to chaotic traffic patterns, many phenomena observed in nature and in society show complex emergent behavior on different scales. The modeling and simulation of such phenomena continues to intrigue scientists and researchers across different fields, from computational sciences, traffic engineering, urban planning, to social sciences. Understanding and reproducing the visual appearance and dynamic behavior of such complex phenomena through simulation is valuable for enhancing the realism of virtual scenes and for improving the efficiency of design evaluation. This is especially important for interactive applications, where it is impossible to manually animate all the possible interactions and responses beforehand. In this talk, we introduce several hybrid models that synthesize together macroscopic models of the large-scale flows and local representations of small-scale behaviors to capture both the aggregate dynamics and fine-grained details of such phenomena with significantly accelerated performance. Some of the example dynamical systems that I will describe using these hybrid techniques include turbulent fluids, granular flows, crowd animation, traffic simulation, and sound synthesis. I conclude by discussing some possible future directions.
Ming C. Lin is currently John R. & Louise S. Parker Distinguished Professor of Computer Science at the University of North Carolina (UNC), Chapel Hill. She obtained her B.S., M.S., and Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from the University of California, Berkeley. She received several honors and awards, including the NSF Young Faculty Career Award in 1995, Honda Research Initiation Award in 1997, UNC/IBM Junior Faculty Development Award in 1999, UNC Hettleman Award for Scholarly Achievements in 2003, Beverly W. Long Distinguished Professorship 2007-2010, Carolina Women's Center Faculty Scholar in 2008, UNC WOWS Scholar 2009-2011, IEEE VGTC Virtual Reality Technical Achievement Award in 2010, and eight best paper awards at international conferences. Her research interests include physically-based modeling, virtual environments, sound rendering, haptics, robotics, and geometric computing. She has (co-)authored more than 220 refereed publications in these areas and co-edited/authored four books. She has served on numerous program committees of leading conferences and co-chaired dozens of international conferences and workshops. She is currently the Editor-in-Chief of IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, a member of 6 editorial boards, and a guest editor for over a dozen of scientific journals and technical magazines. She also has served on several steering committees and advisory boards of international conferences, as well as government and industrial technical advisory committees.
Ana Paiva
Talk title
Empathy in Social Agents
Abstract
Empathy is often seen as the capacity to perceive, understand and experience others' emotions. This notion is often seen as one of the major elements in social interactions between humans. As such, when creating social agents, that are believable and able to engage users in social interactions, empathy needs to be addressed. Indeed, for the past few years, many researchers have been looking at this problem, not only in trying to find ways to perceive the user's emotions, but also to adapt to them, and react in an empathic way. This talk will provide an overview of this new challenging area of research, by analyzing empathy in the social relations established between humans and social agents, and providing a concrete model for the creation of empathic social agents.
Professor Ana Paiva is an Associate Professor at Instituto Superior Tecnico, Technical University of Lisbon and a research group leader at INESC-ID. She is well known in the area of Intelligent Virtual Agents, Affective Computing, User Modelling and Artificial Intelligence Applied to Education. After her PhD in the UK (University of Lancaster), she has worked in Germany (in GMD) and in France (CNRS-COAST team at the ENS of Lyon). In 1996 she returned to Portugal where she created a group on intelligent agents and synthetic characters (GAIPS). Her research is focused on the affective elements in the interactions between users and computers and in particular in the interaction with synthetic virtual agents. She served as a member of numerous international conference and workshops. She has (co)authored over 120 publications in refereed journals, conferences and books. She was a founding member of the Kaleidoscope Network of Excellence SIG on Narrative and Learning Environments, and has been very active in the area of Synthetic Characters and Intelligent Agents. She co-ordinated the participation of INESC-ID in several European projects, such as the IDEALS (funded under the Telematics program), NIMIS (an I3-ESE project), DiViLab and Safira (IST- 5th Framework), where she was the prime contractor, VICTEC, COLDEX, MindRaces, E-Circus, and LIREC (in the 7th framework).
Ying-Qing Xu
Talk title
Image and video tooning
Abstract
The cartoon and animation are very popular, but only well-trained artists are capable to create such an artistic work. How to use computer to automatically generate the cartoon and animation is a big challenging. In this talk, Dr. Xu will introduce the recent research works on the image and video tooning.
Dr. Ying-Qing Xu is currently a lead researcher of Microsoft Research Asia (MSRA, Beijing China) where he has worked since 1999. Ying-Qing received his Sc.B from the Department of Mathematics of Jilin University, and his Ph.D from the Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS). He has co-authored over 60 papers in computer graphics, computer vision, and user interface design. He has had over 20 granted and more pending US patents. His current research interests are in computer graphics and natural user interface.He is the director of ¡°Microsoft Digital Cartoon and Animation Laboratory of Beijing Film Academy¡±.