CS Colloq: Places Everyone: Creating an Animated Tapestry of Human Activity for Virtual Worlds

Title: Places Everyone: Creating an Animated Tapestry of Human Activity for Virtual WorldsSpeaker: Jan Allbeck(UPENN)Abstract:
As we journey through our day, our lives intersect with other people. We see people leaving for work, waiting for trains, meeting with friends, hard at work, and thousands of other activities that we may not even be conscious of. People create a rich tapestry of activity throughout our day, a human texture. We may not always be aware of this texture, but we would definitely notice if it were missing, and it is missing from many simulations. Creating virtual scenarios that simulate a substantial human population with typical and varied behaviors can be an overwhelming task. In addition to modeling the environment and characters, tagging the environment with semantic data, and creating motions for the characters, the simulation engineer also needs to create character profiles for a heterogeneous population and link these character traits to appropriate behaviors to be performed at appropriate times and in appropriate places during the simulation. Due to the large number of individuals, the variety of behaviors they may engage in, and the potential complexity of environments, this is currently beyond the scope of military, crowd research, or entertainment simulations. At present, simulations either have a very limited number of character profiles or are meticulously hand scripted. I will describe a framework, called CAROSA (Crowds with Aleatoric, Reactive, Opportunistic, and Scheduled Actions), that will facilitate the creation of heterogeneous populations for large scale simulations by using a commercial off-the-shelf software package (Microsoft Outlook®), a Parameterized Action Representation (PAR), and multiple human agent simulation software (HiDAC). CAROSA incorporates four different broad action types: scheduled, reactive, opportunistic, and aleatoric. Scheduled activities arise from specified roles for individuals or groups; reactive actions are triggered by contextual events or environmental constraints; opportunistic actions arise from explicit goals and priorities; aleatoric actions are random but structured by choices, distributions, or parametric variations. The CAROSA architecture enables the specification and control of actions for more realistic large scale human textures in virtual worlds such as buildings and cities, links human characteristics and high level behaviors to animated graphical depictions, and relieves some of the burden in creating and animating heterogeneous 3D animated human populations.Biography:
I am a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Computer and Information Science, which is a part of the School of Engineering and Applied Science at the University of Pennsylvania. My advisor is Dr. Norman I. Badler. I am also Associate Director of the Center for Human Modeling and Simulation (HMS), where I coordinate and participate in the research projects affiliated with HMS as well as coordinating the operational aspects of the lab facility. I have Bachelors degrees in Mathematics and Computer Science from Bloomsburg University and a Masters degree in Computer and Information Science from Penn. I have had the great opportunity to explore many aspects of computer graphics, but am most drawn to research at the crossroads of animation, artificial intelligence, and psychology in the simulation of virtual humans. My current research focuses on the creation and simulation of heterogeneous, functional crowds.

Location: Seaver Science Library (SSL) - 150

Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

Contact: CS Colloquia