Abstract: For use in the entertainment industry, computer graphics/animation has made significant strides over the past two decades through advances in physics-based simulation and control. In this context, one of the most difficult open challenges going forward is the biomimetic simulation and control of the human body. This talk will present our progress toward a comprehensive simulator that confronts the combined challenge of biomechanically modeling and neuromuscularly controlling more or less all of the relevant articular bones and muscles in the body, as well as simulating the physics-based deformations of the soft tissues. A significant component of our model is the neck-head-face complex, which addresses the important role that the neck plays in synthesizing the head movements that are essential to so many aspects of human behavior. Our anatomically consistent biomechanical model confronts us with many challenging motor control problems, even for the relatively simple task of balancing the mass of the head in gravity atop the cervical spine. I will present a neuromuscular control model that emulates the relevant biological motor control mechanisms. Employing machine learning techniques, the neural networks within our controllers may be trained offline to efficiently generate the pose and stiffness control signals needed to synthesize a variety of autonomous human movements. The talk will be richly illustrated with images and videos.

Brief Biography of the Speaker:
Demetri Terzopoulos (PhD '84 MIT) is the Chancellor's Professor of Computer Science at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is a Guggenheim Fellow, a Fellow of the ACM, IEEE and Royal Society of Canada, and a Member of the European Academy of Sciences. Among his many honors are an Academy Award for Technical Achievement from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for his pioneering work on physics-based computer animation, and the inaugural Computer Vision Significant Researcher Award from the IEEE for his pioneering and sustained research on deformable models and their applications. One of the most highly cited authors in engineering and computer science according to ISI and other indexes, his publications include more than 300 research papers and several volumes, primarily in computer graphics, computer vision, medical imaging, computer-aided design, and artificial intelligence/life. He has given over 400 talks internationally on these topics, among them about 100 distinguished, keynote, and plenary addresses. Before joining UCLA in 2005, Dr. Terzopoulos held the Lucy and Henry Moses Endowed Professorship in Science at New York University and was Professor of Computer Science and Mathematics at NYU's Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences. Previously, he was Professor of Computer Science and Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Toronto, where he continues to hold status-only faculty appointments.