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Assistant Professor
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We are building something exciting here: a computer animation research program that involves both the technical and arts communities. We are working to bring artists and scientists together in designing the next generation of animation tools and developing innovative uses of the media. If you'd like to be involved - either as a graduate student or as someone who already works in the area - please drop me a line.
Research Interests
Too many things interest me, but my main research focuses on understanding and modeling human movement. This is done in an effort to create better character animation tools, and ultimately, to make it easier for people to tell their stories. Specific areas of interest include:
- Lessons from the performing arts literature on movement
- Physics-based models to improve motion quality
- Gesture modeling and animation
- Interactive animation
- Software tool design
- Social and cultural impacts of technology
Group News
- 08/08: Our work on gesture modelling is presented at ACM SIGGRAPH 08 in Los Angeles. You can find the TOG paper here.
- 10/07: Collapse (Suddenly Falling Down) premieres at the Mondavi Studio. This collaboration with dance professor Della Davidson and Sideshow Physical Theatre, along with members of the Geology and Computer Science departments, deployed motion capture technology in order to allow dancers to interact with LIDAR scans during the performance and also to draw new imagery.
- 09/07: Work on modeling and animating gesture receives Best Paper Award at Intelligent Virtual Agents, '07.
- 09/07: Two new graduate students, Pengcheng Luo and Yejin Kim, join the group.
- 02/07: Motion capture lab is operational. The Motion Lab has been set up featuring a twelve camera optical motion capture system in a 750' studio.
Graduate Students
- Yejin Kim (Ph.D. student, 2007 -- present)
- Pengcheng Luo (Ph.D. student, 2007 -- present)
- Tyler Martin (Ph.D. student, 2007 -- present)
Brief Bio
A lifelong interest in art, science and technology has led me to a position that blends the three. As an undergraduate, I was a member of the first class of the Engineering and Society Program at McMaster University. It allowed me to combine a computer engineering degree with a drama minor and studies on the social and environmental impacts of technology. I completed both a Masters and a PhD (2005) as a member of the Dynamic Graphics Project, the computer graphics and interaction research group in the Department of Computer Science, University of Toronto. My initial research focused on modeling natural phenomena and during my Ph.D., I concentrated on character animation. I also spent time teaching in rural Kenya, spawning enduring interests in Africa and development. After graduate school, I spent a year as a post-doctoral fellow with the computer graphics research group at the Max Planck Institut für Informatik in Saarbrücken, Germany, before assuming my position at Davis, cross-appointed to Computer Science and Technocultural Studies.Mailing Address
Department of Computer Science,
2063 Kemper Hall,
University of California, Davis,
One Shields Avenue,
Davis, CA 95616
U.S.A