Publications

  1. AdaptNet: Policy Adaptation for Physics-Based Character Control, Xu, Pei, Kaixiang Xie, Sheldon Andrews, Paul G. Kry, Michael Neff, Morgan Mcguire, Ioannis Karamouzas, and Victor Zordan. ACM Transactions on Graphics (TOG) 42, no. 6 (2023): 1-17. (video)

  2. A Comprehensive Review of Data-Driven Co-Speech Gesture Generation, Nyatsanga, Simbarashe, Taras Kucherenko, Chaitanya Ahuja, Gustav Eje Henter, and Michael Neff. Eurographics State of the Art Report (STAR), Computer Graphics Forum, Volume 24 (2023), Number 2.

  3. Tunable Tension for Gesture Animation, Michael Neff, ACM International Conference on Intelligent Virtual Agents (IVA '22), 2022. (video errata)

  4. A Motion Matching-based Framework for Controllable Gesture Synthesis from Speech, Ikhsanul Habibie, Mohamed Elgharib, Kripashindu Sarkar, Ahsan Abdullah, Simbarashe Nyatsanga, Michael Neff, Christian Theobalt, SIGGRAPH, 2022. (supplemental, video)

  5. Multimodal analysis of the predictability of hand-gesture properties, Taras Kucherenko, Rajmund Nagy, Michael Neff, Hedvig Kjellström, Gustav Eje Henter, 21st International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS), 2022. (website)

  6. Videoconference and Embodied VR: Communication Patterns Across Task and Medium, Ahsan Abdullah, Jan Kolkmeier, Vivian Lo and Michael Neff, Proceedings of the ACM for Human-Computer Interaction, Vol. 5, No. CSCW2, Article 453, October 2021.

  7. Evaluating Study Design and Strategies for Mitigating the Impact of Hand Tracking Loss, Ylva Ferstl, Rachel McDonnell and Michael Neff, ACM Symposium for Applied Perception, 2021.

  8. The Perceptual Consistency and Association of the LMA Effort Elements, Hye Ji Kim, Michael Neff and Sung-Hee Lee, ACM Transactions on Applied Perception, January 2021.

  9. ExpressGesture: Expressive Gesture Generation from Speech through Database Matching, Ferstl Y., M. Neff, and R. McDonnell, Computer Animation and Virtual Worlds, Special Issue: CASA 2021.

  10. Virtual hands in VR: motion capture, synthesis, and perception, Sophie Jörg, Yuting Ye, Michael Neff, Franziska Mueller, Victor B. Zordan, SIGGRAPH Asia Courses 2020, Article 2.

  11. Understanding the Predictability of Gesture Parameters from Speech and Their Perceptual Importance, Ylva Ferstl, Michael Neff and Rachel McDonnell, Intelligent Virtual Agents, 2020.

  12. Virtual hands in VR: motion capture, synthesis, and perception, Sophie Jörg, Yuting Ye, Michael Neff, Franziska Mueller, Victor B. Zordan, SIGGRAPH Courses 2020: 16:1-145.

  13. Adversarial gesture generation with realistic gesture phasing, Ylva Ferstl, Michael Neff and Rachel McDonnell, Computers & Graphics, Vol. 89, pp. 117-130, June 2020.

  14. Neural Processing and Production of Gesture in Children and Adolescents With Autism Spectrum Disorder, Fourie, E., Palser, E. R., Pokorny, J. J., Neff, M., Rivera, S. M., Frontiers in Psychology, 10, 2020.

  15. Multi-objective Adversarial Gesture Generation, Ylva Ferstl, Michael Neff and Rachel McDonnell, ACM SIGGRAPH Conference on Motion, Interaction and Games, 2019. [video]

  16. Spring Rigs for Skinning, Nicholas Toothman and Michael Neff, ACM SIGGRAPH Conference on Motion, Interaction and Games, 2019. [video]

  17. The Impact of Multi-Character Story Distribution and Gesture on Children’s Engagement, Harrison Jesse Smith, Brian Riley, Lena Reed, Vrindavan Harrison, Marilyn Walker and Michael Neff, ICIDS (International Conference on Interactive Digital Storytelling), 2019. (Best long paper nominee) [video]

  18. Efficient Neural Networks for Real-time Motion Style Transfer, Harrison Jesse Smith, Chen Cao, Michael Neff and Yingying Wang, Proceedings of the ACM in Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques (PACMCGIT), vol. 2, no. 2, 2019. [video]

  19. What do we express without knowing? Emotion in Gesture, Gabriel Castillo and Michael Neff, AAMAS 2019.

  20. The Impact of Avatar Tracking Errors on User Experience in VR, Nicholas Toothman and Michael Neff, IEEE VR, 2019. [video]

  21. Classifying Learner Behavior from High Frequency Touchscreen Data Using Recurrent Neural Networks, Pardos, Z.A., Hu, C., Meng, P., Neff, M., and Abrahamson, D, Adjunct Proceedings of the 26th Conference on User Modeling, Adaptation and Personalization (UMAP'18). Singapore. ACM. 6 pages, 2018.

  22. Communication Behavior in Embodied Virtual Reality, Harrison Jesse Smith and Michael Neff, Proceedings of CHI 2018 – the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 2018. [Supplemental Doc] (Honourable Mention Award)

  23. Mimebot - Investigating the Expressibility of Non-Verbal Communication Across Agent Embodiments, Simon Alexanderson, Carol O’Sullivan, Michael Neff and Jonas Beskow, ACM Transactions on Applied Perception, 2017.

  24. Pedagogical Agents to Support Embodied, Discovery-based Learning, Ahsan Abdullah, Mohammad Adil, Leah Rosenbaum, Miranda Clemmons, Mansi Shah, Dor Abrahamson and Michael Neff. Proceedings of Intelligent Virtual Agents (IVA'17), Springer Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2017.

  25. Understanding the Impact of Animated Gesture Performance on Personality Perceptions, Harrison Jesse Smith and Michael Neff, ACM Transactions on Graphics,Vol. 36, No. 4, Article 49, 2017.[video]

  26. PERFORM: Perceptual Approach for Adding OCEAN Personality to Human Motion using Laban Movement Analysis, Funda Durupinar, Mubbasir Kapadia, Susan Deutsch, Michael Neff and Norman I. Badler, ACM Transactions on Graphics, 2016. Studies Results

  27. Hand Gesture Synthesis for Conversation, Michael Neff, in Handbook of Human Motion, edited by Bertram Müller and Sebastian I. Wolf, Springer.

  28. Walk the Talk: Coordinating Gesture with Locomotion for Conversational Characters PREPRINT, Yingying Wang, Kerstin Ruhaland, Michael Neff and Carol O'Sullivan, Journal of Computer Animation and Virtual Worlds (Special Issue, CASA '16 - Computer Animation and Social Agents), 2016. [video]

  29. A Corpus of Gesture-Annotated Dialogues for Monologue-to-Dialogue Generation from Personal Narratives, Zhichao Hu, Michelle Dick, Chung-Ning Chang, Kevin Bowden, Michael Neff, Jean E. Fox Tree, Marilyn Walker, LREC 2016.

  30. A Verbal and Gestural Corpus of Story Retellings to an Expressive Embodied Virtual Character, Jackson Tolins, Kris Liu, Michael Neff, Marilyn Walker, Jean E. Fox Tree, LREC 2016.

  31. A Multimodal Corpus of Matched and Mismatched Extravert-Introvert Conversational Pairs, Jackson Tolins, Kris Liu, Yingying Wang, Jean E. Fox Tree, Marilyn Walker, Michael Neff, LREC 2016.

  32. Assessing the Impact of Hand Motion on Virtual Character Personality, Yingying Wang, Jean E. Fox Tree, Marilyn Walker and Michael Neff, ACM Transactions on Applied Perception, Vol. 13, Issue 2, March 2016. [video].

  33. Deep Signatures for Indexing and Retrieval in Large Motion Databases, Yingying Wang and Michael Neff, ACM SIGGRAPH Conference on Motion in Games 2015 (MIG 2015) [video] (Best Paper Award).

  34. Two Techniques for Assessing Virtual Agent Personality, Kris Liu, Jackson Tolins, Jean E. Fox Tree, Michael Neff and Marilyn A. Walker, IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing, Vol. 7, Issue 1, 2016.

  35. Storytelling Agents with Personality and Adaptivity, Chao Hu, Marilyn A. Walker, Michael Neff and Jean E. Fox Tree. In WP Brinkman, J. Broekens and Dirk Heylen (Eds.), Proceedings of Intelligent Virtual Agents, 2015.

  36. State of the Art in Hand and Finger Modeling and Animation, Wheatland, Nkenge; Wang, Yingying; Song, Huaguang; Neff, Michael; Zordan, Victor; Joerg, Sophie. Computer Graphics Forum, 2015. (presented at Eurographics 2015) [bibtex]

  37. Boundary interactions: resolving interdisciplinary collaboration challenges using digitized embodied performances, Flood, V. J., Neff, M., & Abrahamson, D. In T. Koschmann, P. Hakkinen, & P. Tchounikine (Eds.), Exploring the material conditions of learning: opportunities and challenges for CSCL, the Proceedings of the Computer Supported Collaborative Learning (CSCL) Conference Gothenburg, Sweden: International Society of the Learning Sciences, 2015.

  38. Temporal Transfer of Locomotion Style, Yejin Kim, Myunggyu Kim, and Michael Neff. ETRI Journal, vol. 37, no. 2, pp. 406-416, Apr. 2015. [video at]

  39. Embodying Digital Creativity: Designing Computer Tools to Support Spontaneity and Creative Work in the Arts, Nicholas Toothman, Tyler Martin and Michael Neff. in Digital Movement: Essays in Motion Technology and Performance, ed. Sita Popat and Nick Salazar, Palgrave MacMillan, 2014.

  40. Data-driven Glove Calibration for Hand Motion Capture, Yingying Wang and Michael Neff.  ACM SIGGRAPH/Eurographics Symposium on Computer Animation,  2013 [video]

  41. The Influence of Prosody on the Requirements for Gesture-Text Alignment, Yingying Wang and Michael Neff. Proceedings of Intelligent Virtual Agents (IVA'13), Springer Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Vol. 8108, Aylett, R.; Krenn, B.; Pelachaud, C.; Shimodaira, H. (Eds.), 2013.

  42. An Examination of Whether People Prefer Agents Whose Gestures Mimic Their Own,Pengcheng Luo, Victor Ng-Thow-Hing and Michael Neff. Proceedings of Intelligent Virtual Agents (IVA'13), Springer Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Vol. 8108, Aylett, R.; Krenn, B.; Pelachaud, C.; Shimodaira, H. (Eds.), 2013. [video]

  43. Judging IVA Personality Using an Open-Ended Question, Kris Liu, Jackson Tolins, Jean E. Fox Tree, Marilyn Walker, Michael Neff. Proceedings of Intelligent Virtual Agents (IVA'13), Springer Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Vol. 8108, Aylett, R.; Krenn, B.; Pelachaud, C.; Shimodaira, H. (Eds.), 2013.

  44. A System for Automatic Animation of Piano Performances, Yuanfeng Zhu, Ajay Sundar Ramakrishnan, Bernd Hamann and Michael Neff. Computer Animation and Virtual Worlds.        [video]

  45. Automatic Hand-Over Animation for Free-Hand Motions from Low Resolution Input, C. Kang, N. Wheatland, M. Neff, V. Zordan. Proceedings of Motion in Games, 12 pages, 2012.        [project page]

  46. Yukiko Nakano, Michael Neff, Ana Paiva, and Marilyn Walker (Eds.). "Intelligent Virtual Agents (IVA 2012)", Lecture Notes in Computer Science 7502, Springer, Heidelberg, 2012.

  47. A Perceptual Study of the Relationship Between Posture and Gesture for Virtual Characters, Pengcheng Luo and Michael Neff.  Proceedings of Motion in Games,  12 pages, 2012.        [video]

  48. Interactive Quadruped Animation, Tyler Martin and Michael Neff.  Proceedings of Motion in Games,  12 pages, 2012.        [video]

  49. Component-based Locomotion Composition, Yejin Kim and Michael Neff.  ACM SIGGRAPH/Eurographics Symposium on Computer Animation,  9 pages, 2012.        [video]

  50. Michael Neff. Lessons from the Arts: What the Performing Arts Literature Can Teach Us about Creating Expressive Character Movement, in Nonverbal Communication in Virtual Worlds, ETC Press, 2012.

  51. Michael Neff, Nicholas Toothman, Robeson Bowmani, Jean E. Fox Tree, and Marilyn Walker. Don't Scratch! Self-adaptors Reflect Emotional Stability, Proceedings of Intelligent Virtual Agents (IVA'11), Springer LNAI, 14 pages, 2011. (long paper, 19.6% accepted)

  52. Automating Expressive Locomotion Generation, Yejin Kim and Michael Neff, Transactions on Edutainment (CASA 2011), 14 pages, 2011.

  53. Brian F. Allen, Michael Neff and Petros Faloutsos, Analytic Proportional-Derivative Control for Precise and Compliant Motion, International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), May 2011.

  54. Brian F. Allen, Michael Neff, and Petros Faloutsos, Pose Control in Dynamic Conditions, R. Boulic, Y. Chrysantou, and T. Komura (Eds.): Motion in Games (MIG) 2010, LNCS 6459, pp. 48--58. Springer, Heidelberg (2010).

  55. Evaluating the Effect of Gesture and Language on Personality Perception in Conversational Agents, Michael Neff, Yingying Wang, Rob Abbott and Marilyn Walker. Proceedings of Intelligent Virtual Agents (IVA'10), LNCS, 14 pages, 2010. (long paper, 19% accepted) [sample clips from the study (the original publication is available at www.springerlink.com)]

  56. Exploiting Motion Capture for Virtual Human Animation: Data Collection and Annotation Visualization, Alexis Heloir, Michael Neff and Michael Kipp. In: Proc. of the LREC Workshop on "Multimodal Corpora: Advances in Capturing, Coding and Analyzing Multimodality", ELDA, 2010.

  57. Blending Art and Science in the Production Collapse (suddenly falling down), preprint, Michael Neff, Dawn Sumner, Gerald W. Bawden, Ellen Bromberg, James P. Crutchfield, Della Davidson, Louise H. Kellog and Oliver Kreylos. Leonardo Journal, Vol. 43, No. 3, pp.274-281, 2010.

  58. Blending Art and Science to Create Collapse (suddenly falling down), Michael Neff, Dawn Sumner, Gerald W. Bawden, Ellen Bromberg, Della Davidson, Louise H. Kellog and Oliver Kreylos. Leonardo Transactions, Leonardo Journal - Transactions, Vol. 43, No. 2, 2010.

  59. Augmenting Gesture Animation with Motion Capture Data to Provide Full-Body Engagement, Pengcheng Luo, Michael Kipp, Michael Neff. Proceedings of Intelligent Virtual Agents (IVA'09), 14 pages, 2009. (long paper, 19% accepted) [video]

  60. Interactive Editing of Motion Style Using Drives and Correlations, Michael Neff and Yejin Kim.  ACM SIGGRAPH/Eurographics Symposium on Computer Animation,  10 pages, 2009.        [video, examples of exaggeration and diminishment]

  61. Statistical Reconstruction and Animation of Specific Speakers' Gesturing Styles, Michael Neff, Michael Kipp, Irene Albrecht, Hans-Peter Seidel.  ACM Transactions on Graphics, Vol. 27, No. 1, pp. 5:1-24, March 2008. [main video, subject comparison, kinematic-dynamic comparison, arm drop showing the role of dynamics, ]

  62. An Annotation Scheme for Conversational Gestures : How to economically capture timing and form (pre-print), Michael Kipp, Michael Neff and Irene Albrecht.  Journal on Language Resources and Evaluation - Special Issue on Multimodal Corpora, Vol. 47, No. 3-4, pp. 325-339, 2007.

  63. Towards Natural Gesture Synthesis: Evaluating gesture units in a data-driven approach to gesture synthesis, Michael Kipp, Michael Neff, Kerstin Kipp and Irene Albrecht.Proceedings of Intelligent Virtual Agents (IVA'07), LNAI 4722, pp. 15-28, 2007. (long paper, 19% accepted)(Best Paper Award)

  64. Layered Performance Animation with Correlation Maps, Michael Neff, Irene Albrecht and Hans-Peter Seidel.  , Computer Graphics Forum 26 (3) (EUROGRAPHICS 07), pp.675-684, 2007. [conference video, live capture of simple mapping demo]

  65. From Performance Theory to Character Animation Tools (Chapter 24), Michael Neff and Eugene Fiume. , in Human Motion - Understanding, Modelling, Capture and Animation, Computational Imaging and Vision (36), eds. B. Rosenhahn, R. Klette and D. Metaxas, Springer, pp. 583-612, 2007.

  66. Modeling Relaxed Hand Shape for Character Animation, Michael Neff and Hans-Peter Seidel.  Articulated Motion and Deformable Objects (AMDO 2006), volume 4069 of LNCS, pp.262-70, 2006. [hand data and errata video]

  67. An Annotation Scheme for Conversational Gestures : How to economically capture timing and form , M. Kipp, M. Neff and I. Albrecht.  Proceedings of the Workshop on "Multimodal Corpora" at LREC 2006, pp. 24-27.

  68. AER: Aesthetic Exploration and Refinement for Expressive Character Animation, Michael Neff and Eugene Fiume.  ACM SIGGRAPH/Eurographics Symposium on Computer Animation, 2005.        [video, Shorter video highlighting the effects of character sketches and edits.]

  69. Methods for Exploring Expressive Stance, Michael Neff and Eugene Fiume.  Graphical Models,  Volume 68, Issue 2, March 2006, pp. 133-157. [preprint the final corrected article is available from Science Direct]

  70. Predictive Feedback for Interactive Control of Physics-based Characters, Joe Laszlo, Michael Neff and Karan Singh.  Computer Graphics Forum 24(3) (EUROGRAPHICS 05), pp. 257-266, 2005.[Check here for animations etc.]       

  71. Methods for Exploring Expressive Stance, Michael Neff and Eugene Fiume.  ACM SIGGRAPH/Eurographics Symposium on Computer Animation, pp. 49-58, 2004.        [video]

  72. Artistically Based Computer Generation of Expressive Motion, Michael Neff and Eugene Fiume.  Proceedings of the AISB 2004 Symposium on Language, Speech and Gesture for Expressive Characters.  pp. 29-39, 2004.        [Kinematic animation of a character giving the direction , Dynamic version of the same animation using tension control to generate a loose feel., A side by side comparison at 1/3 speed of the kinematic and loose dynamic animation., A side by side comparison at 1/3 speed of the kinematic animation and a stiff dynamically simulated animation.  Notice that in the stiff simulation, most of the nuances from the loose dynamic animation are missing., A sequence of movement properties are applied to a "beauty line" reaching motion., A same reaching motion is performed, but "repellant" properties are applied.]

  73. Aesthetic Edits for Character Animation, Michael Neff and Eugene Fiume.  ACM SIGGRAPH/Eurographics Symposium on Computer Animation.  pp. 239-244, 2003.        [The succession edit is applied to kinematic and dynamic versions of a bowing motion., A side by side comparison of a bowing motion with and without the succession edit., Succession, amplitude and extent edits applied to a "twist" dance motion., By reducing the amplitude and extend of a large motion, you can create a small nuanced motion that can be used to add colour to a character. ]

  74. Modeling Tension and Relaxation for Computer Animation,  Michael Neff and Eugene Fiume.  ACM SIGGRAPH Symposium on Computer Animation.  pp. 81-88, 2002.        [errata, more info and animations]

  75. A Visual Model For Blast Waves and Fracture,  Michael Neff and Eugene L. Fiume . Graphics Interface '99.  pp. 193-202, 1999.

Refereed Posters, Oral Papers and Short Work

  1. Speech2Properties2Gestures: Gesture-Property Prediction as a Tool for Generating Representational Gestures from Speech, Taras Kucherenko, Rajmund Nagy, Patrik Jonell,Michael Neff,Hedvig Kjellström,Gustav Eje Henter, Extended Abstract, ACM Intelligent Virtual Agents (IVA), 2021.

  2. "The Impact of Gesture and Distributing Story between Multiple Characters on Children’s Engagement with an Animated Story Telling Application", Harrison Jesse Smith, Brian Riley, Marilyn Walker and Michael Neff, APA conference Technology Mind and Society, Washington DC, October 3-5, 2019. (poster)

  3. A Virtual and Interactive Light-Art-Like Representation of Human Silhouette, Momoko Tsuchiya, Takayuki Itoh, Michael Neff, Yuhan, Liu, Cyberworlds 2019, Kyoto, Japan. (poster paper)

  4. Attachment-based character deformation, Nicholas Toothman and Michael Neff, Proceedings of the ACM SIGGRAPH/Eurographics Symposium on Computer Animation, 2017. (Poster)

  5. A Parameterized Schema for Representing Complex Gesture Forms, Huaguang (Chad) Song and Michael Neff, Intelligent Virtual Agents 2016. (Poster).

  6. Animated-GIF libraries for capturing pedagogical gestures: An innovative methodology for virtual tutor design and teacher professional development, Virginia J. Flood, Michael Neff and Dor Abrahamson. 7th Conference of the International Society for Gesture Studies, Paris, 2016.

  7. Analysis in Support of Realistic Timing in Animated Fingerspelling, Nkenge Wheatland, Ahsan Abdullah, Michael Neff, Sophie Joerg, Victor Zordan, IEEE VR, 2016.

  8. Evaluating personality trait attribution based on gestures by virtual agents, Kris Liu, Jackson Tolins, Jean Fox Tree, Marilyn Walker, Michael Neff. CogSci 2014. July 25, 2014.

  9. Development of the Neural Correlates of Gesture Processing in Adolescence. Sievers, E., Pokorny, J., Neff, M., and Rivera, S. Poster Presentation, Society for Research in Child Development Biennial Meeting, Seattle, WA, April 2013.

  10. Gestural Adaptation in Extravert-Introvert Pairs and Implications for IVAs,Jackson Tolins, Kris Liu, Yingying Wang, Jean E. Fox Tree, Marilyn Walker, Michael Neff. Proceedings of Intelligent Virtual Agents (IVA'13), Springer Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Vol. 8108, Aylett, R.; Krenn, B.; Pelachaud, C.; Shimodaira, H. (Eds.), 2013.

  11. Segmentation of hand gestures using motion capture data , Ramakrishnan, Ajay Sundar, and Michael Neff, Proceedings of the 2013 international conference on Autonomous agents and multi-agent systems. International Foundation for Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems, 2013

  12. Interactive Quadruped Animation, Tyler Martin and Michael Neff. ACM SIGGRAPH/Eurographics Symposium on Computer Animation, 2012 (poster, 2 pages).

  13. Automatic Torso Engagement for Gesturing Characters, Michael Neff. Proceedings of Intelligent Virtual Agents (IVA'08), LNCS 5208, pp. 522-23, 2008.

  14. Modeling Ambient Lower Body Motion, Sageev Oore and Michael Neff.  ACM SIGGRAPH/Eurographics Symposium on Computer Animation Poster Session, 2004.

Theses

  1.  A Visual Model for Blast Waves and Fracture.  Michael Neff.  Master's Thesis, Department of Computer Science, University of Toronto, 1998. (Also available as a pdf.)
  2.  Aesthetic Exploration and Refinement: A Computational Framework for Expressive Character Animation .  Michael Neff.  Ph.D. Thesis, Department of Computer Science, University of Toronto, 2005. (Formatted for double-sided printing. Also available in single sided formatting by request.)