In the first part of the talk, I will present an overview of the research projects at the computer graphics lab at UCLA, that include facial animation, sketch-based interfaces for mobile devices, robotic surgery, steering for virtual pedestrians, physics-based animation, motion editing, micro-processor architectures for virtual world applications et al. In the second part of the talk I will focus on virtual agent navigation. I will present our egocentric affordance fields algorithm, which is one of the few approaches for pedestrian steering that features efficient space-time planning for deadlock avoidance. I will conclude by discussing SteerSuite, our solution to the challenging problems of automatically evaluating and debugging steering algorithms.
Petros Faloutsos is an assistant professor at the Department of Computer Science at the University of California at Los Angeles. He 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 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 on the topology of the Internet. Professor Faloutsos is a member of the Editorial Board of the Journal of The Visual Computer and has served as a Program Co-Chair for the ACM SIGGRAPH/Eurographics Symposium on Computer Animation 2005. He is a member of the ACM and the Technical Chamber of Greece.
