Description
Victoria University of Wellington's Computational Media Innovation Centre is hosting two international experts in computer graphics and computer science. These experts will present talks on Tuesday 9 April sharing their expertise and discussing recent challenges and advances in their respective areas.
Talks
Karan Singh: On Creative Visual Design and Communication
Sketching, sculpting, speech and gesture have often been touted as “natural” approaches to interactive design and visual communication. While these metaphors are indeed a promising medium of visual communication, there are a number of inherent limitations in human motor control, execution skill, perception, and ambiguities of inference, that make the leap from a mental concept to creative visual communication a challenging task. In this talk, Karan will present recent research and open challenges in the area of shape modeling, expressive speech and AR/VR for creative visual communication, including commercial systems like ILoveSketch, meshmixer, flatfab, jali and janusvr.
Hao Li: Pinscreen/USC/ICT or: How I learned to Stop Worrying and Love 3 Jobs.
Hao will discuss his vision of human digitization and how his research at the University of Southern California has evolved over the years, moving from face capture, to hair digitization, full 3D avatar creation, to advanced 3D deep learning technologies. He will also talk about how his startup Pinscreen was born, and how they grew from a simple research prototype to building a platform for AI-driven human digitization, including the challenges they faced in technological and business development. Hao will also share his experiences juggling a start up, being a faculty member at the University of California, and directing a government sponsored research lab.
Speaker Bios
Karan Singh
Professor of Computer Science, University of Toronto
Co-founder, Arcestra (architectural design), JALI (facial animation), and JanusVR (Virtual Reality)
Bio:
Karan Singh is a Professor of Computer Science at the University of Toronto. He co-directs a globally reputed graphics and HCI lab, DGP, has over 100 peer-reviewed publications, and has supervised over 40 MS/PhD theses. His research interests lie in interactive graphics, spanning art and visual perception, geometric design and fabrication, character animation and anatomy, and interaction techniques for mobile, Augmented and Virtual Reality (AR/VR). He has been a technical lead for the Oscar award winning software Maya and was the R&D Director for the 2004 Oscar winning animated short Ryan. He has co-founded multiple companies including Arcestra (architectural design), JALI (facial animation), and JanusVR (Virtual Reality).
Hao Li
CEO & Co-Founder, Pinscreen, Inc.
Assistant Professor of Computer Science, University of Southern California
Director of the Vision and Graphics Lab, USC Institute for Creative Technologies
Bio:
Hao Li is a Computer Science professor and entrepreneur, working in the fields of Computer Graphics and Computer Vision. He is founder and CEO of Pinscreen, Inc., assistant professor of Computer Science at the University of Southern California, as well as director of the Vision and Graphics Lab at the USC Institute for Creative Technologies. He was previously a visiting professor at Weta Digital and a research lead at Industrial Light & Magic / Lucasfilm. His algorithms for 3D processing are widely used in the visual effects industry for automating the creation of digital humans, as well as enabling the ability to capture facial performances in real-time in virtual production. At Weta Digital, he was responsible for the high-fidelity facial performance capture pipeline that reenacted the deceased actor Paul Walker in the movie Furious 7 (2015). For his contributions, Li received the TR35 Award in 2013, recognizing him as one of the top 35 innovators under the age of 35, from the MIT Technology Review.
For more information contact: Ayumi Kimura
ayumi.kimura@vuw.ac.nz