Computer Science 795: Virtual Humans

Meets

Professor

Office hours will be held every Wednesday from 9-10:30am in ENGR 5324 or by appointment.

Prerequisite

About the Class

In this class we will explore state-of-the-art approaches for simulating virtual humans both from the animation and artificial intelligence perspectives. We will read, discuss, and review papers from the foremost conferences in the field. There will be 3-5 papers assigned per week. Students will be expected to energetically participate in discussions of the assigned papers and work and report on a research project throughout the semester.

Topics will include:

• Modeling (brief overview):
  • Meshes, deformations, rigging
• Animation/motion synthesis:
  • Motion capture, physically-based, procedural (e.g. faces, locomotion, reach, constraints)
• Smart Animation:
  • Motion planning, path planning, navigation, sensing, semantic representations,
• Crowd Simulation:
  • Authoring, scale, LOD, etc
• Behavior Selection:
  • Scripts, rule-based systems, utility theory, reactions, decision trees, etc
• Decision-making:
  • Goal formulation, memory, learning, AI LOD, etc
• Embodied Conversation Characters:
  • Back-channels, dialog synthesis, gestures, lip-synch, etc
• Individual Differences:
  • Personality, emotion, roles, status, culture, etc
• Applications and evaluations

Blackboard and Course Web Page

http://cs.gmu.edu/~jallbeck/cs795/

https://mymasonportal.gmu.edu/

Texts

None

Assessment Plan for the Course

Class Participation (50%) and Course Project (50%)

GMU Academic Calendar

Honor Code

Disability Resource Center