This approach uses a single reference motion trajectory to produce a control system for human running that is robust to a range of disturbances and velocity commands.

You can now splash water, swirl smoke, and many other things with a point based animation method.

Mesh Ensemble Motion Graphs enable the real-time motion playback of these irises with complicated collision behavior.

News

SIGGRAPH 2012

Congratulations to the authors of the papers to be presented at Siggraph 2012:

• Junggon Kim and Nancy Pollard, Fast Simulation of Skeleton-Driven Deformable Body Characters
• Ijaz Akhter, Tomas Simon, Sohaib Khan, Iain Matthews, and Yaser Ajmal Sheikh, Bilinear Spatiotemporal Basis Models
• Eakta Jain, Yaser Ajmal Sheikh, Moshe Mahler, and Jessica Hodgins, Three-Dimensional Proxies for Hand-Drawn Characters
• Marek Vondrak, Leonid Sigal, Jessica Hodgins, and Odest Jenkins, Video-based 3D Motion Capture through Biped Control
• Carl Doersch, Saurabh Singh, Abhinav Gupta, Josef Sivic, and Alexei Efros, What Makes Paris Look like Paris

SCA 2012

Three papers co-authored by graphics lab members will be presented at the Symposium on Computer Animation 2012 in Lausanne, Switzerland:

• Alfred Barnat and Nancy Pollard, Smoke Sheets for Graph-Structured Vortex Filaments .
• Peng Guan, Leonid Sigal, Valerie Reznitskaya, and Jessica Hodgins, Multi-linear Data-Driven Dynamic Hair Model with Efficient Hair-Body Collision Handling.
• Sarah L. Taylor, Moshe Mahler, Barry-John Theobald, and Iain Matthews, Dynamic Units of Visual Speech.

Graduations

Graphics lab members Eakta Jain and Ronit Slyper successfully defended their Ph.D theses. Eakta presented "Attention-guided Algorithms to Retarget and Augment Animations, Stills and Videos" and Ronit presented "Sensing Through Structure". Eakta is joining Texas Instruments to work on algorithms for augmented reality and natural gestures. Ronit will start a post-doctoral position at the Interdisciplinary Center in Herzliya, Israel. Congratulations Eakta and Ronit!!

Best Paper Honorable Mention at ICCP

Raoul de Charette, Robert Tamburo, Peter Barnum, Anthony Rowe, Takeo Kanade and Srinivasa Narasimhan won the Best Paper Honorable Mention Award for their paper titled "Fast Reactive Illumination through Rain and Snow" at the 2012 IEEE International Conference on Computational Photography. Based on this work, they are building a vehicular headlight that will make it less stressful to drive in snowstorms and rainstorms.

Sophie Joerg gets faculty position at Clemson University

Congratulations to Sophie Joerg, a postdoctoral fellow in the graphics lab, for her new position as Assistant Professor in the School of Computing at Clemson University. Sophie's research focuses on the perception of human-like motions and on developing new algorithms and tools for the animation of virtual characters. She is looking forward to continuing her research at Clemson University and to teaching courses in Clemson's Ph.D. program in Computer Science and its M.F.A. in Digital Production Arts.

CAREER Award for James Hays

Congratulations to graphics lab alumnus James Hays for receiving an NSF CAREER award. The award is a highly selective grant that the National Science Foundation awards to junior faculty members who are likely to become academic leaders of the future. The research funded by James’s CAREER award aims to understand, represent, and enhance scenes at the Internet-scale. James and his team are investigating "detail synthesis" tasks which alleviate camera shake, motion blur, defocus, or low resolution. A key insight behind this research is that Internet scale photo collections and scene matching provide an ideal, context-specific statistical model which can be used to insert convincing texture and object detail. To improve scene matching the team will study attribute-based representations of scenes -- a powerful intermediate representation for the next generation of big data imaging research.
James Hays received his Ph.D. in 2009, working with Alexei Efros, and is currently an Assistant Professor in the Computer Science Department at Brown University.

Siggraph Asia 2011

Find out how to do cross-domain image searches this year at Siggraph Asia by attending the following talk:

• Abhinav Shrivastava, Tomasz Malisiewicz, Abhinav Gupta, and Alexei Efros, Data-driven Visual Similarity for Cross-domain Image Matching .

Tech Crunch wrote about the results of the paper in an article titled CMU Researchers One-Up Google Image Search And Photosynth With Visual Similarity Engine. The Pittsburgh local media also quotes Alexei Efros in a recent article in Pop City on innovation.

SCS dissertation award goes to graphics lab alumnus

Congratulations to Jean-François Lalonde, the winner of this year's SCS Dissertation award. The thesis titled Understanding and Recreating Visual Appearance Under Natural Illumination has also been nominated for the ACM Doctoral Dissertation award.

Jean-François recently received his Ph.D. in Robotics from Carnegie Mellon University, under the supervision of Profs Alexei (Alyosha) Efros and Srinivasa Narasimhan.

AnimalZ

Former graphics lab animation designer, Moshe Mahler, has made his animated short film "AnimalZ" viewable online. The short film was completed in 2010 and shown over the last year at various film festivals, including SIGGRAPH 2011, Vancouver.

AnimalZ from Moshe Mahler on Vimeo.

Kayvon Fatahalian joins the CMU Graphics Lab

Kayvon Fatahalian has recently joined the CMU Graphics Lab as an Assistant Professor in the School of Computer Science. Kayvon graduated with a PhD from Stanford University in 2010 and in the past year he worked for Lytro, a Silicon Valley startup. Prior to Stanford, as an undergraduate at Carnegie Mellon University, Kayvon was also part of the Graphics Lab. His research interests are in the areas of graphics and systems and his research focuses on the design of programming abstractions and efficient parallel systems for compute-intensive applications such as interactive graphics. For the fall 2011 semester Kayvon will be teaching Graphics and Imaging Architectures. Welcome Kayvon!