Abstract
Aggregates of numerous entities, such as a group of people and fleet of vehicles, form complex systems that exhibit interesting biological, social, cultural, and spatial patterns observed in nature and in society. Modeling of the collective behaviors remains an open research challenge in computer graphics, robotics, architecture, physics, psychology, social sciences, and civil and traffic engineering, as complex systems often exhibit distinct characteristics, such as emergent behaviors, self-organization, and pattern formation, due to multi-scale interactions among individuals and groups of individuals. Despite decades of observation and studies, collective behaviors are particularly not well understood for groups with non-uniform spatial distribution and heterogeneous behavior characteristics, such as pedestrian and vehicle traffic in urban scenes, evacuation flows in complex structures, and coupled human-natural systems.
In this talk, the speaker will survey some recent efforts on addressing the problem of modeling, simulating, and directing virtual agents in complex dynamic environments. In particular, she will describe several complementary approaches for local collision avoidance, global navigation, and flow control of multiple entities, including both crowds and traffic, in urban scenes and city highways. The speaker will further highlight the challenges of designing scalable algorithms for these problems by taking advantages of parallelism available on emerging commodity hardware, such as graphics processing units and manycore processors. She will present potential opportunities of modeling a dynamic cityscape and their application in large-scale motion synthesis, and coordination of multiple autonomous agents in computer games, virtual environments, and digital media. Finally, the speaker will conclude by discussing our experience and some future research directions.
About the speaker
Prof Ming C. Lin received her PhD in Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences from the University of California at Berkeley in 1993. She joined the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1997 and is currently John R. & Louise S. Parker Distinguished Professor of Computer Science. She is also an honorary Chair Professor (Yangtze Scholar) at Tsinghua University.
Prof Lin’s research interests include physically-based modeling, virtual environments, sound rendering, haptics, robotics, and geometric computing. She has (co-)authored more than 250 refereed publications in these areas and co-edited/authored 4 books including Applied Computation Geometry, High-Fidelity Haptic Rendering, Haptic Rendering: Foundations, Algorithms and Applications and Algorithmic Foundations of Robotics. She has served on numerous program committees of leading conferences and co-chaired a number of international conferences and workshops. She is currently the editor-in-chief of IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics and a member of 6 editorial boards.
Prof Lin is a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). She received numerous honors and awards including the US National Science Foundation Young Faculty Career Award, Honda Research Initiation Award, IEEE VGTC Virtual Reality Technical Achievement Award and eight best paper awards at international conferences, etc.
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