Course Details

Sample Topics include but not limited to:

Week 1: Motivation and Introduction

The students will be introduced to the exciting new developments in Visual Computing and how Artificial Intelligence stands to disrupt these application domains. Students will be briefly introduced to different topics including Character Animation, Digital Storytelling, Computer-Aided Design, and Virtual and Augmented Reality.

Week 2 -3: Advancements in Animating Autonomous Virtual Humans

The students will be introduced to recent advancements in Artificial Intelligence (Motion Planning, Machine Learning) for animating humanoid virtual characters. Beyond character animation, we will also describe methods for synthetic visual and auditory perception, goal-directed collision avoidance, navigation, and multi-actor behavior authoring. This series of lectures will conclude with an open question of what’s next? How can these enabling technologies be deployed in the application domains described in Week 1 ?

Week 4: Models of Personality, Mood, Emotion, Behavior in Autonomous Virtual Humans

The students will be introduced to well-established models of personality (e.g., the OCEAN personality model), mood, and emotion, and behavior, and how they may be integrated into established pipelines for animating virtual humans.

Week 5 - 6: Deep Reinforcement Learning for Humanoid Agents

This lecture will describe recent trends in deep reinforcement learning (specifically Deep Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning and Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning) for learning optimal controllers for humanoid agents.

Week 7 - 8: Recent Trends in Crowd Simulation

We will provide an overview of the most recent trends in simulating human crowd behavior. Topics will include social force models, reciprocal velocity obstacles, and hybrid methods.

Week 9 – 10 : Machine Learning for Crowd Modeling:

We will describe recent advancements in learning how to predict long-term crowd activity patterns from observations of real crowd behavior.

Week 11 - 12: Cognitive Modeling for Human Wayfinding

In contrast with expert-based models and machine learning techniques, we will also investigate how cognitive principles can be utilized in the modeling of autonomous agents – focusing on human wayfinding as an application domain.

Week 13: AI for Digital Storytelling

We will review recent advancements in machine learning for multi-modal story comprehension, and synthesizing animated stories. We will also describe how passive animated content can be enhanced to create immersive, interactive stories.

Week 14: AI for Computer-Aided Design

We will introduce concepts in Artificial Intelligence for computer-aided design applications, focusing on architectural design as a case study.

Week 15: Virtual Reality for Serious Games

We will describe recent advancements in Virtual Reality (esp. shared online virtual reality) and how these platforms can be used for serious games and the study of collective human behavior.