Faculty Host: Dimitris Metaxas

Abstract:

An ambitious goal in the area of computer animation is the creation of virtual actors that autonomously synthesize realistic human motions and possess a broad repertoire of lifelikesmotor skills. To this end, the control of dynamic, anthropomorphic figures subject to gravity and contact forces remains a difficult open problem. This talk will report on our ongoing development of a "virtual stuntman", a dynamic graphical character that possesses a nontrivial repertoire of lifelike motor skills. Our virtual stuntman is based on a previously proposed framework for integrating motor controllers, which includes among other ingredients an explicit model of pre-conditions; i.e., those regions of a dynamic figure's state space within which a given motor controller is applicable and expected to work properly. We have recently extended this framework by incorporating kinematic control and transitions between dynamic and kinematic animation.

Time permitting, I will also present a brief overview of our work on the facial animation of the virtual stuntman. In particular, I will present a new method for editing speech related facial motions. Our method uses an unsupervised learning technique, Independent Component Analysis (ICA), to extract a set of meaningful parameters without any annotation of the data. With ICA, we are able to solve a blind source separation problem and describe the original data as a linear combination of two sources. One source captures content (speech) and the other captures style (emotion). By manipulating the independent components we can intuitively edit facial motion.

Speaker Bio:

Petros Faloutsos is an assistant professor at the Department of Computer Science at the University of California at Los Angeles. Faloutsos received his PhD degree (2002) and his MSc degree in Computer Science from the University of Toronto, Canada and his BEng degree in Electrical Engineering from the National Technical University of Athens, Greece.

Professor Faloutsos works in the area of Computer Graphics and Animation, focusing on physics-based animation techniques for anthropomorphic virtual characters. He is the founder and the director of the graphics lab at the Department of Computer Science at UCLA. The lab, called MAGIX (Modeling Animation and GrafIX), performs state of the art research in all aspects of graphics, focusing on virtual actors, virtual reality, physics-based animation and motor control.

Professor Faloutsos is also interested in computer networks and he has co-authored a highly cited paper that models the topology of the Internet. Professor Faloutsos is a member of the ACM and the Technical Chamber of Greece (Professional Engineers).