Monday November 4th, 2002
2:00 p.m.
The Center for Advanced Technology
715 Broadway 12th floor
Small Conference Room

Thursday, November 14th, 2002
5:00 p.m.
Irving H. Jurow Lecture Hall
100 Washington Square East

Ken Perlin, Professor of Computer Science
at the
Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences
and Faculty of Arts and Science
will lecture on,
More Than Words Can Say: New Modes of Communication for Networked Citizens
Reception to follow

Thursday, November 21st, 2002
3:00 p.m.
719 Broadway, 12th Floor Small Conference Room

Synthesizing Believable Facial Motion
Erika Chuang, Stanford University

Animation of facial speech and expressions has experienced increased attention in the graphics community recently. Most current research focuses on techniques for capturing, synthesizing and retargeting facial motion. Little attention has been paid to the problem of controling and modifying the expression itself.

In this talk, I will describe a technique based on factorization model that separates video data of expressive facial speech into expressive features and underlying speech content. This allows, for example, a sequence originally recorded with a happy expression to be modified so that the speaker appears to be speaking with an angry or or neutral expression. Although the expression has been modified, the new sequences maintain the same visual speech content as the original sequence. I will also discuss the limitation of this model, which is the lack of temporal coherency. Finally I will draw an analogy to recent work on texture synthesis as a motivation for future directions.

Thursday, November 21st, 2002
7:00 p.m.
Tisch Hall
Room 200

John SanGiovanni, Microsoft Technical Evangelist, will be discussing current wireless technologies and overviewing several Microsoft mobile platforms, including Tablet PC, Pocket PC and SmartPhone. John will be followed by Brian Schneider from Microsoft College Recruiting who will be talking about technical full-time and internship opportunities working on products as developers, testers, and program managers.

There will be time for Q & A for both John and Brian after the presentation.

Friday November 22nd, 2002
3:00 p.m.
719 Broadway 12th Floor
Small Conference Room

Animation by Example
Michael Gleicher,
University of Wisconsin - Madison

Motion for computer animation is notoriously difficult to create. In order to achieve the expressiveness, subtlety and realism of quality motion, practitioners have relied on either capturing the movements of real performers, or labor and skill intensive manual specification methods. Such methods create specific, short clips of motion. These clips may provide the desired quality, but lack the flexibility required when all movements cannot be pre-planned. In contrast to clip-based methods, motion synthesis approaches can flexibly create motions on the fly, but (to date) have not provided sufficient quality.

In this talk, I will survey our efforts to create high-quality motion for animation in a flexible manner. I will begin by reviewing some of our previous efforts in motion editing, the problem of adapting motions to meet new needs. I will discuss how the successes and failures of these approaches have lead us to a number of new directions. I will describe several of our recent results, including preserving the fine details of motions during editing, creating high-level control abstractions for motion, and synthesizing new motions by assembling pieces of existing motions. Combined, these developments promise to allow flexible creation of high-quality motion based on an initial set of example motions.

BIO: Michael Gleicher is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Sciences at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Prof. Gleicher joined the University in 1998 to start a computer graphics group within the department. The overall goal of his research is to create tools that make it easier to create pictures, video, animation, and virtual environments; and to make these visual artifacts more interesting, entertaining, and informative. His current focus is on tools for character animation and for the automatic production of video.

Prior to joining the university, Prof. Gleicher was a researcher at The Autodesk Vision Technology Center and at Apple Computer's Advanced Technology Group. He earned his Ph. D. in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University, and holds a B.S.E. in Electrical Engineering from Duke University.