CS Colloquium
Thursday, October 15, 2009
4:00 p.m., AKW 200

Host: Julie Dorsey

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Speaker: Carol O'Sullivan, Trinity College Dublin
Title: Creating Variety in Crowd Simulation

Abstract: Before an environment can be populated with characters, a set of models must first be acquired and prepared. Sometimes it may be possible for artists to create each virtual character individually - for example, if only a small number of individuals are needed, or there are many artists available to create a larger population of characters. However, for most applications that need large and heterogeneous groups or crowds, more automatic methods of generating large numbers of humans, animals or other characters are needed. Fortunately, depending on the context, it is not the case that all types of variety are equally important. Sometimes quite simple methods for creating variations, which do not over-burden the computing resources available, can be as effective as, and perceptually equivalent to, far more resource-intensive approaches.

In this talk, I will present some recent research and development efforts in Trinity College Dublin and elsewhere that aim to create and evaluate variety for characters, in their bodies, faces, movements, behaviours and sounds.

Bio: Carol O'Sullivan leads the Graphics, Vision and Visualisation group (GV2) in Trinity College Dublin. After receiving a B.A. in Mathematics from Trinity College in 1988, she worked for several years as a software engineer in industry (mainly in Germany), followed by a Masters degree from Dublin City University in 1996 and a PhD in computer graphics from TCD in 1999. Her research interests include perception, animation, virtual humans and crowds. She was elected a Fellow of Trinity College Dublin and of Eurographics in 2003 and 2007 respectively. She has been a member of many IPCs, including the Eurographics and SIGGRAPH papers committees, and has published over 100 peer-reviewed papers. She has organised and co-chaired several conferences and workshops, including Eurographics'05 in Dublin, the SIGGRAPH/EG Symposium on Computer Animation 2006 and the SIGGRAPH/EG Campfire on Perceptually Adaptive Graphics 2001. She is the programme co-chair of the SIGGRAPH Symposium on Applied Perception in Graphics and Visualization 2009, is the co-Editor in Chief of ACM Transactions on Applied Perception and an editorial board member of IEEE Computer Graphics & Applications and Graphical Models.