zoran-headshot

Zoran Popović

Professor

Director, Center for Game Science

Founder, Chief Scientist Enlearn


University of Washington
Dept. Of Computer Science and Engineering
Box 352350, [express mail: Allen Center 101]
Seattle, WA 98195-2350
Office: 590 Allen Center (directions)
(206) 543-4226

Assistant:
Jayashree Hari

latest news

11/29/13

A featured article in Wired Magazine covers Washington State Algebra Challenge.

9/25/13

Foldit receives the Dr. Frank H. Netter Award for Special Contributions to Medical Education.

09/12/13

KUOW airs a 5 minute piece on the Washington State Algebra Challenge's that showed that over 90% of elementary school students can master key algebra concepts after 1.5 hours.

08/26/13

Front page of Seattle times reports on exciting outcomes of the Washington State Algebra Challenge.

3/28/13

Foldit receives honorable mention for Technical Excellence at the 15th Annual IGF Awards.

3/05/13

Interview for NPR Science segment on scientific-discovery games.

1/31/13

Foldit wins the 2012 Katerva Award.

1/31/13

An awesome animated documentary on Foldit.

1/2/13

The Scientist profiles our games for learning and scientific-discovery.

9/24/12

An interview and presentaion at NBC News Education Nation Summit hosted by Tamron Hall.

6/07/12

Bloomberg Businessweek Innovator of the week.

5/01/12

Seth Cooper wins the 2011 ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award (the best PhD in Computer Science) with his thesis "A Framework for Scientific Discovery through Video Games".

[see older news]

3/7/12

The Center for Game Science and Foldit make the list of the World's 50 Most Innovative Companies.

2/3/12

Foldit wins 1st Prize in the 2011 International Science and Engineering Visualization Challenge.

1/22/12

Foldit players invent a brand new protein 18 times more reactive than previous findings. This marks the third Foldit player authored Nature paper. Followup in The Wall Street Journal.

12/05/11

Foldit in Boston Globe, New York Times and The Economist.

12/01/11

Foldit wins TechFlash Newsmaker award in the "Innovation of the Year" award.

11/07/11

UW team wins the International IGem 2011 grand prize. The team's project used Foldit to redesign a key enzyme for Celiac disease.

11/22/11

Foldit players discover state-of-the art algorithms. Published in Proceedings of National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

10/28/11

Refraction wins the Prize for the Best Work in the Primary School Category in the 38th NHK Japan Prize, 2011.

9/18/11

A new Nature article: after 15 years of stumping scientists, Foldit players solve a protein structure in just 3 weeks.

9/1/11

Seattle Business Magazine has an extended article on our Center for Game Science.

7/12/11

Three new papers presented at SIGGRAPH 2011.

6/30/11

Three papers presented at Foundations of Digital Games 2011.

4/05/11

Yun-En Liu receives NSF graduate fellowship.

12/13/10

Two papers on game science accepted to CHI 2011. One of them wins a nomination for the Best Paper Award.

11/01/10

Seattle Magazine's Most Influential list of 2010 includes me and David Baker for our impact with scientific-discovery games.

09/16/10

NPR's All Things Considered story on Foldit and the power of game-based democratized science.

08/09/10

New York Times article covers our Foldit Nature paper and our future plans for scientific discovery games.

08/04/10

Nature publishes paper on Foldit produced proteins in August 5 2010 issue. The first nature paper where results are produced by game play, and most certainly the Nature's first paper with over 200,000 authors!

07/28/10

Refraction wins a Grand Prize in the Disney Learning Challenge. Refraction is a game prototype that discovers optimal pathways for learning fractions.

06/10/10

Six games produced in the 10-week Games Capstone class make it big in the wild: two independent reviews (1, 2), second best game of the week, and third best game of the month at Kongregate.com, over $3,000 in awards and earnings in first two weeks, and more than 10 web distribution contracts.

03/29/10

Six papers accepted over the weekend: three conditionally accepted to ACM TOG (SIGGRAPH), and three accepted to Foundations of Digital Games.

02/16/10

Karen Liu (PhD, 2006) wins Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship.

02/23/10

New York Times writes a science article about our latest serious game PhotoCity that aims to eventually reconstruct a 3D replica of the entire world.

01/07/10

Brett Allen (PhD, 2005) receives a Technical Achievement Oscar for development of iMocap.

9/20/09

Adrien Treuille (PhD, 2008) wins the TR-35 award, two years after Karen Liu (PhD, 2006) wins the same award.

4/20/09

Foldit feature article in WIRED magazine.

4/6/09

Two papers on character dynamics and control accepted to SIGGRAPH.

3/21/09

Foldit story on PRI.

7/22/08

New York Times article talks about Foldit.

5/8/08

Foldit goes open beta, with an article in The Economist, and a press release.

3/13/08

DraftTrack, developed from our realtime fluids paper, nominated for Sports Emmy (Technical Achievement).

2/08/08

A TV version of the dance symmetry paper in Nature, airs on Valentine's day again.

[see less news]

Zoran joined the CSE faculty in the summer of 1999. He received a Sc.B. with Honors in Computer Science from Brown University in 1991, M.S. in Computer Science in 1993 and a Ph.D. in Computer Science in 1999 from Carnegie Mellon University. His Ph.D. dissertation research focused on the automatic synthesis and transformation of realistic character animation. His thesis also involved numerous performances of embarrassing acts.  He has also held research positions at Sun Microsystems and Justsystem Pittsburgh Research Center and University of California at Berkeley.  Zoran's research interests lie primarily in computer graphics, especially in character animation, motion editing, physically based modeling and modeling/simulation of natural phenomena. He is also interested in nonlinearly constrained optimization, motion planning and biomechanics.

Zoran enjoys spending his free time outdoors. He is also an avid tanguero and a lindy hopper.

You will find a more official short bio here.

Awards

Selected Publications

"Subgroup Robustness Grows On Trees: An Empirical Baseline Investigation." with Gardner, J. and & Schmidt, L.. in Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems, 35, 9939-9954. 2022. [pdf]
"Exploring the Role of Local and Global Explanations in Recommender Systems." with Radensky, M., Downey, D., Lo, K., & Weld, D. S. in CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems Extended Abstracts (pp. 1-7) 2022. [project]
"Modernizing Training in Psychotherapy Competencies With Adaptive Learning Systems: Proof of Concept." with Renn, B. N., Areán, P. A., Raue, P. J., Aisenberg, E., Friedman, E. C. in Research on social work practice, 31(1), 90-100. 2021. [pdf]
"Integrated morphoelectric and transcriptomic classification of cortical GABAergic cells." with Gouwens, N., et al. in Cell, 183(4), 935-953. 2020. [pdf]
"Building de novo cryo-electron microscopy structures collaboratively with citizen scientists." with Khatib, F., et al. in PLoS Biology, 17(11), e3000472. 2019. [pdf]
"De novo protein design by citizen scientists." with Koepnick, B., et al. in Nature, 570(7761), 390-394. 2019. [pdf]
"Automatic generation of problems and explanations for an intelligent algebra tutor." with O’Rourke, E., Butler, E., Díaz Tolentino, A. in 20th International Conference, AIED 2019, Proceedings, Part I 20 (pp. 383-395). 2019. [pdf]
"An analysis and evaluation of the WeFold collaborative for protein structure prediction and its pipelines in CASP11 and CASP12." with Keasar, C. et. al in Scientific reports, 8(1), 1-18. 2018. [pdf]
"Automatic diagnosis of students' misconceptions in k-8 mathematics." with Feldman, M. Q., Cho, J. Y., Ong, M., Gulwani, S., & Andersen, E. in Proceedings of the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 1-12). 2018. [pdf]
"Empowering families facing english literacy challenges to jointly engage in computer programming." with Banerjee, R., et al. in Proceedings of the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 1-13). 2018. [pdf]
"A framework for computer-aided design of educational domain models." with Butler, E., Torlak, E. in Verification, Model Checking, and Abstract Interpretation: 19th International Conference, VMCAI (pp. 138-160). 2018. [pdf]
"Collaborative problem solving in an open-ended scientific discovery game." with Bauer, A. in Proceedings of the ACM on human-computer interaction, 1(CSCW), 1-21. 2017. [pdf]
"Dragon architect: open design problems for guided learning in a creative computational thinking sandbox game." with Bauer, A., Butler, E. in Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games (pp. 1-6). 2017. [pdf]
"Synthesizing interpretable strategies for solving puzzle games." with Butler, E., Torlak, E. in Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games (pp. 1-10). 2017. [pdf]
"Analysis of Problem-Solving Behavior in Open-Ended Scientific-Discovery Game Challenges." with Bauer, A., Flatten, J. in International Educational Data Mining Society. 2017. [pdf]
"Where to add actions in human-in-the-loop reinforcement learning." with Mandel, T., Liu, Y. E., Brunskill, E. in Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (Vol. 31, No. 1). 2017. [pdf]
"Crowdsourcing accurate and creative word problems and hints." with Chen, Y., Mandel, T., Liu, Y. E. in Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Human Computation and Crowdsourcing (Vol. 4, pp. 12-21). 2016. [pdf]
"Efficient Bayesian Clustering for Reinforcement Learning." with Mandel, T., Liu, Y. E., Brunskill, E. in IJCAI (pp. 1830-1838). 2016. [pdf]
"Power to the People: Addressing Big Data Challenges in Neuroscience by Creating a New Cadre of Citizen Neuroscientists" with Jane Roskamps in Neuron 92 (3) 2016. [pdf]
"Determining crystal structures through crowdsourcing and coursework" with S Horowitz, B Koepnick, R Martin, A Tymieniecki, A A Winburn, S Cooper, J Flatten, D Rogawski, N Koropatkin, T Hailu, N Jain, P Koldewey, L Ahlstrom, M Chapman, A Sikkema, M Skiba, F Maloney, F Beinlich, Foldit Players, D Baker, F Khatib, J Bardwell in Nature Communications 7, 2016. [article]
"Empowering Children To Rapidly Author Games and Animations Without Writing Code" with R Banerjee, J Yip, KJ Lee in Proceedings of the The 15th International Conference on Interaction Design and Children 2015. [article]
"A Framework for Parameterized Design of Rule Systems Applied to Algebra" with Eric Butler, Emina Torlak in International Conference on Intelligent Tutoring Systems (320-326) 2016. [pdf]
"Proactive Sensing for Improving Hand Pose Estimation" with Dun-Yu Hsiao, Min Sun, Christy Ballweber, Seth Cooper in Proceedings of the 2016 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (2348-2352) 2016. [pdf]
"Brain Points: A Deeper Look at a Growth Mindset Incentive Structure for an Educational Game" with Eleanor O'Rourke, Erin Peach, Carol S Dweck in Proceedings of the Third (2016) ACM Conference on Learning@ Scale (41-50) 2016. [pdf]
"Offline evaluation of online reinforcement learning algorithms" with Travis Mandel, Y Liu, Emma Brunskill in Proceedings of the Thirtieth Conference on Artificial Intelligence 2016/2/21. [pdf]
"Crowdsourcing Accurate and Creative Word Problems and Hints" with Yvonne Chen, Travis Mandel, Yun-En Liu in AAAI Conference on Human Computation and Crowdsourcing (HCOMP) 2016. [pdf]
"Nanocrafter: Design and Evaluation of a DNA Nanotechnology Game" with Barone, J., et al. in Foundations of Digital Games. 2015. [pdf]
"Approaches for teaching computational thinking strategies in an educational game" with Aaron Bauer, Eric Butler in Blocks and Beyond Workshop (Blocks and Beyond), (121-123) 2015. [pdf]
"Interactive control of diverse complex characters with neural networks" with Igor Mordatch, Kendall Lowrey, Galen Andrew, Emanuel V Todorov in Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS) (3132-40) 2015. [pdf]
"Personalized Mathematical Word Problem Generation" with Oleksandr Polozov, Eleanor O’Rourke, Adam Smith, Luke Zettlemoyer, Sumit Gulwani, in IJCAI 2015/6/22. [pdf]
"Large-Scale Educational Campaigns" with Yun-En Liu, Christy Ballweber, Eleanor O’Rourke, Eric Butler, Phonraphee Thummaphan, to appear in ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interactions (TOCHI), 2015. [pdf]
"Automatic Game Progression Design through Analysis of Solution Features" with Eric Butler, Erik Andersen, Adam M. Smith, Sumit Gulwani, to appear in Proceedings of Conference on Human factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2015), 2015. [pdf]
"A Framework for Automatically Generating Interactive Instructional Scaffolding" with Eleanor O’Rourke, Erik Andersen, Sumit Gulwani to appear in Proceedings of Conference on Human factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2015), 2015. [pdf]
"The Queue Method: Handling Delay, Heuristics, Prior Data, and Evaluation in Bandits" with Travis Mandel, Yun-En Liu, Emma Brunskill, in AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) 2015. [pdf]
"WeFold: a coopetition for protein structure prediction" with George A. Khoury et al. and Foldit Players Proteins: Structure, Function, and Bioinformatics (2014). [pdf]
"Trading Off Scientific Knowledge and User Learning with Multi-Armed Bandits" with Yun-En Liu, Travis Mandel, Emma Brunskill in Educational Data Mining (EDM) 2014 [pdf]
"Learning Individual Behavior in an Educational Game: A Data-Driven Approach" with Seong-Jae Lee, Yun-En Liu in Educational Data Mining (EDM) 2014 [pdf]
"Generalizing Locomotion Style to New Animals with Inverse Optimal Regression" with Kevin Wampler, Jovan Popović in Transactions on Graphics (SIGGRAPH) 2014 [pdf] [project]
"Offline Policy Evaluation Across Representations with Applications to Educational Games" with Travis Mandel, Yun-En Liu, Sergey Levine, Emma Brunskill in Autonomous Agents and MultiAgent Systems (AAMAS) 2014 [pdf]
"Hint Systems May Negatively Impact Performance in Educational Games" with Nell O’Rourke, Christy Ballwebber in Learning at Scale 2014 (LAS 2014) [pdf]
"Towards Automatic Experimentation of Educational Knowledge" with Yun-En Liu, Travis Mandell, Emma Brunskill in CHI 2014 [pdf]
"Brain Points: A Growth Mindset Incentive Structure Boosts Persistence in an Educational Game" with Nell O’Rourke, Kyla Haimovitz, Carol Dweck in CHI 2014 [pdf]
"A Mixed-Initiative Tool for Designing Level Progressions in Games" with Eric Butler, Adam M. Smith, Yun-En Liu in UIST 2013. [pdf] [video]
"Predicting Player Moves in an Educational Game: A Hybrid Approach" with Yun-En Liu, Travis Mandel, Eric Butler, Erik Andersen, Eleanor O’Rourke and Emma Brunskill in Educational Data Mining (EDM) 2013 [pdf] best paper nomination
"Automatic Redesign of Local Playspace Properties" with Aaron Bauer and Seth Cooper in Proceedings of the Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games (FDG 2013) [pdf]
"Quantifying over Play: Constraining Undesirable Solutions in Puzzle Design" with Adam M. Smith and Eric Butler in Foundations of Digital Games 2013 [pdf]
"The Effects of Age on Player Behavior in Educational Games" with O’Rourke, E., Butler, E., Liu, Y. and Ballwebber, C. in Foundations of Digital Games 2013 [pdf]
"A Trace-based Framework for Analyzing and Synthesizing Educational Progressions" with Erik Andersen and Sumit Gulwani in Computer Human Interaction (CHI) 2013 [pdf]
"Animal Locomotion Controllers from Scratch" with Kevin Wampler and Jovan Popović in Computer Graphics Forum 2013 [pdf]
"RRT-based game level analysis, visualization, and visual refinement" with Aaron Bauer in AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment (AIIDE-12) [pdf]
"Verification games: making verification fun" with Werner Dietl, Stephanie Dietzel, Michael D. Ernst, Nathaniel Mote, Brian Walker, Seth Cooper, Timothy Pavlik, in Proceedings of the 14th Workshop on Formal Techniques for Java-like Programs (42-9) 2012. [pdf]
"Evaluating Competitive Game Balance with Restricted Play" with Alexander Jaffe, Alex Miller, Erik Andersen, Yun-En Liu and Anna Karlin in AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment (AIIDE-12) [pdf]
"A Case Study of Expressively Constrainable Level Design Automation Tools for a Puzzle Game" with Adam M. Smith, Erik Andersen, Michael Mateas in Foundations of Digital Games 2012 [pdf]
"Contact-Invariant Optimization for Hand Manipulation" with Igor Mordatch and Emanuel Todorov in Eurographics/ACM Symposium on Computer Animation (SCA 2012) [pdf]
"Discovery of Complex Behaviors through Contact-Invariant Optimization" with Igor Mordatch and Emanuel Todorov in ACM Transactions on Graphics (ACM SIGGRAPH 2012) [pdf]
"Continuous Character Control with Low-Dimensional Embeddings" with Sergey Levine, Jack M. Wang, Alexis Haraux, Vladlen Koltun in ACM Transactions on Graphics (ACM SIGGRAPH 2012) [pdf] [project]
"The Impact of Tutorials on Games of Varying Complexity" with Erik Andersen, Eleanor O’Rourke, Yun-En Liu, Richard Snider, Jeff Lowdermilk, David Truong, Seth Cooper in CHI 2012 [project] [pdf] [related papers]
"Increased Diels-Alderase activity through backbone remodeling guided by Foldit players" with Christopher B Eiben, Justin B Siegel, Jacob B Bale, Seth Cooper, Firas Khatib, Betty W Shen, Foldit Players, Barry L Stoddard and David Baker in Nature Biotechnology (2012) [project] [pdf]
"Nonlinear Inverse Reinforcement Learning with Gaussian Processes" with Sergey Levine, Vladlen Koltun in NIPS 2011 [pdf] [project]
train-hopping
"Space-Time Planning with Parameterized Locomotion Controllers" with Sergey Levine, Yongjoon Lee, Vladlen Koltun in ACM Transactions on Graphics 30 (3) [pdf] [video]
dynamic controller snapshot
"Composite Control of Physically Simulated Characters", with Uldarico Muico, and Jovan Popović, in ACM Transactions on Graphics Vol. 30 Num. 3 (SIGGRAPH 2011). [pdf] [project]
Algorithms discovered by Foldit players
"Algorithm discovery by protein folding game players" with Firas Khatib, Seth Cooper, Michael D. Tyka, Kefan Xu, Ilya Makedon, David Baker, and Foldit Players in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America vol. 108 no. 47 18949-18953 (2011) [pdf] [project]
"High-resolution structure of a retroviral protease folded as a monomer" with Miroslaw Gilski, Maciej Kazmierczyk, Szymon Krzywda, Helena Zábranská, Seth Cooper, Firas Khatib, Frank DiMaio, James Thompson, David Baker, Iva Pichová, and Mariusz Jaskolskia in Acta Crystallographica D67, 907-914 [pdf] [project]
"Crystal structure of a monomeric retroviral protease solved by protein folding game players" with Firas Khatib, Frank DiMaio, Foldit Contenders Group, Foldit Void Crushers Group, Seth Cooper, Maciej Kazmierczyk, Miroslaw Gilski, Szymon Krzywda, Helena Zabranska, Iva Pichova, James Thompson, Mariusz Jaskolski, David Baker in Nature Structural and Molecular Biology 18, 1175-1177 (2011) [pdf] [project]
"On the Harmfulness of Secondary Game Objectives" with Erik Andersen, Yun-En Liu, Rich Snider, Roy Szeto, Seth Cooper in Foundations of Digital Games 2011 [pdf]
"Analysis of Social Gameplay Macros in the Foldit Cookbook" with Seth Cooper, Firas Khatib, Ilya Makedon, Hao Lu, Janos Barbero, David Baker, James Fogarty, Foldit Players in Foundations of Digital Games 2011 [pdf] [project]
"Feature-Based Projections for Effective Playtrace Analysis" with Yun-En Liu, Erik Andersen, Rich Snider, Seth Cooper in Foundations of Digital Games 2011 [pdf]
"Placing a Value on Aesthetics in Online Casual Games" with Erik Andersen, Yun-En Liu, Rich Snider, Roy Szeto in CHI 2011 [pdf] Best Paper Nomination
"PhotoCity: training experts at large-scale image acquisition through a competitive game" with Kathleen Tuite, Noah Snavely, Dun-yu Hsiao, Nadine Tabing in CHI 2011 [pdf]
car driving feature discovery
"Feature Construction for Inverse Reinforcement Learning", with Sergey Levine, Vladlen Koltun in NIPS 2010 [pdf]
responsivenes improvement due to motion fields
"Motion Fields for Interactive Character Locomotion", with Yongjoon Lee, Kevin Wampler, Gilbert Bernstein, Jovan Popović in ACM Transactions on Graphics Vol. 29 Num. 5 (SIGGRAPH Asia 2010) [pdf] [project]
"Predicting protein structures with a multiplayer online game", with Seth Cooper, Firas Khatib, Adrien Treuille, Janos Barbero, Jeehyung Lee, Michael Beenen, Andrew Leaver-Fay, David Baker and Foldit players, in Nature 446 p. 756-760 (05 August 2010). [pdf] [project]
terrain aware turn and stairs
"Terrain-Adaptive Interactive Bipedal Locomotion Control", with Jia-Chi Wu in ACM Transactions on Graphics Vol. 29 Num. 3 (SIGGRAPH 2010) [pdf] [project]
learned bombardment avoiding behavior
"Learning Behavior Styles with Inverse Reinforcement Learning", with Seong Jae Lee in ACM Transactions on Graphics Vol. 29 Num. 3 (SIGGRAPH 2010) [pdf] [project]
sword fight
"Character Animation in Two-Player Adversarial Games", with Kevin Wampler, Erik Andersen, Evan Herbst, Yongjoon Lee, in ACM Transactions on Graphics Vol. 29 Num. 5 [pdf] [project]
foldit snapshot
"The Challenge of Designing Scientific Discovery Games", with Seth Cooper, Adrien Treuille, Janos Barbero, Andrew Leaver-Fay, Kathleen Tuite, Firas Khatib, Alex Cho Snyder, Michael Beenen, David Salesin, David Baker, in International Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games, 2010 [pdf] [project]
photocity card
"Reconstructing the World in 3D: Bringing Games with a Purpose Outdoors", with Kathleen Tuite, Noah Snavely, Dun-Yu Hsiao, Adam M. Smith, in International Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games, 2010 [pdf] [project]
http://grail.cs.washington.edu/projects/playtracer/
"Gameplay Analysis through State Projection", with Erik Andersen, Yun-En Liu, Ethan Apter, François Boucher-Genesse, in International Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games, 2010 [pdf] [project]
revolving door controller
"Compact Character Controllers", with Yongjoon Lee and Seong Jae Lee, in ACM Transactions on Graphics Vol. 28 Num. 5 (SIGGRAPH Asia 2009). [pdf] [project]
pentaped evolution
"Optimal Gait and Form for Animal Locomotion", with Kevin Wampler, in ACM Transactions on Graphics Vol. 28 Num. 3 (SIGGRAPH 2009). [pdf] [project]
dynamic controller snapshot
"Contact-aware Nonlinear Control of Dynamic Characters", with Uldarico Muico, Yongjoon Lee, Jovan Popović, in ACM Transactions on Graphics Vol. 28 Num. 3 (SIGGRAPH 2009). [pdf] [project]
example motions from navigation and dynmic obstacle avoidance controllers
"Near-optimal Character Animation with Continuous User Control,"  with Adrien Treuille and Yongjoon Lee, in ACM Transactions on Graphics Vol. 26 Num. 3 (SIGGRAPH 2007). [pdf] [project]
ball-catching controller
"Active Learning for Real-Time Motion Controllers,"  with Seth Cooper and Aaron Hertzmann, in ACM Transactions on Graphics Vol. 26 Num. 3 (SIGGRAPH 2007). [pdf] [project]
car driving through a pile of leaves
"Model Reduction for Real-time Fluids,"  with Adrien Treuille and Andrew Lewis, in ACM Transactions on Graphics Vol. 25 Num. 3 (SIGGRAPH 2006). [pdf] [project]
evacuation scene
"Continuum Crowds"  with Adrien Treuille and Seth Cooper, in ACM Transactions on Graphics Vol. 25 Num. 3 (SIGGRAPH 2006). [pdf] [project]
"Dance reveals symmetry especially in young men" with Brown, W.M., Cronk, L., Grochow, K., Jacobson, A., Liu, K., Trivers, R. in Nature, Vol. 438 Num. 7071. [project [pdf] [paper] [front cover] [nature podcast]
hand-in-hand walking motion
"Composition of Complex Optimal Multi-Character Motions" with C. Karen Liu, Aaron Hertzmann in ACM SIGGRAPH/Eurographics Symposium on Computer Animation 2006. [pdf] [project]
"Learning a correlated model of identity and pose-dependent body-shape variation for real-time synthesis" with Brett Allen, Brian Curless, Aaron Hertzmann, in ACM SIGGRAPH/Eurographics Symposium on Computer Animation 2006. [ pdf] [ project]
suitcase styles
"Learning Physics-based Motion Style with Inverse Nonlinear Optimization"  with C. Karen Liu and Aaron Hertzmann, in ACM Transactions on Graphics Vol. 24 Num. 3 (SIGGRAPH 2005). [pdf] [project]
Ganesh with a belt
"Physically Based Rigging for Deformable Characters" with Steve Capell, Matthew Burkhart, Brian Curless, Tom Duchamp, in Proceedings of the 2005 ACM SIGGRAPH / Eurographics Symposium on Computer Animation. [pdf] [project]
basketball style and reduced space
"Style-Based Inverse Kinematics" with Keith Grochow, Steve L. Martin and Aaron Hertzmann in ACM Transactions on Graphics Vol. 23 Num. 3 (SIGGRAPH 2004). [pdf] [project]
smoke and liquid man
"Fluid Control using the Adjoint Method" with Adrien Treuille, Antoine McNamara, Jos Stam in ACM Transactions on Graphics Vol. 23 Num. 3 (SIGGRAPH 2004). [pdf] [project]
volleyball smash
"Momentum-based Parameterization of Dynamic Character Motion" with Yeuhi Abe, C. Karen Liu, in ACM SIGGRAPH / Eurographics Symposium on Computer Animation 2004. [pdf] [project]
smoke letters formation
"Keyframe Control of Smoke Simulations" with Adrien Treuille, Antoine McNamara, Jos Stam in ACM Transactions on Graphics Vol. 22 Num. 3 (SIGGRAPH 2003).[pdf] [project]
eagle flight
"Realistic Modeling of Bird Flight Animations"  with Jia-Chi Wu in ACM Transactions on Graphics Vol. 22 Num. 3 (SIGGRAPH 2003). [pdf] [project]
acting a kangaroo
"Layered Acting for Character Animation"  with Mira Dontcheva, Gary Yngve in ACM Transactions on Graphics Vol. 22 Num. 3 (SIGGRAPH 2003). [pdf] [project]
varied human shapes
"The Space of Human Body Shapes: reconstruction and parameterization from range scans"  with Brett Allen, Brian Curless in ACM Transactions on Graphics Vol. 22 Num. 3 (SIGGRAPH 2003). [pdf] [project]
dancing skirt
"Estimating Cloth Simulation Parameters from Video" with Kiran Bhat, Christopher Twigg, Jessica Hodgins, Pradeep Khosla, Steven Seitz in ACM SIGGRAPH / Eurographics Symposium on Computer Animation 2003. [pdf] [project]
golf sketch
"A Sketching Interface for Articulated Figure Animation" with James Davis, Maneesh Agrawala, Erika Chuang, David Salesin in ACM SIGGRAPH / Eurographics Symposium on Computer Animation 2003. [pdf] [project]
hand-spring on boxes
"Synthesis of Complex Dynamic Character Motion from Simple Animations" with C. Karen Liu in ACM Transactions on Graphics Vol. 21 Num. 3 (SIGGRAPH 2002). [pdf] [project]
upper body deformations
"Articulated Body Deformation from Range Scan Data" with Brett Allen, Brian Curless in ACM Transactions on Graphics Vol. 21 Num. 3 (SIGGRAPH 2002).[pdf] [project]
elastic deformations of a cow
"Interactive Skeleton-Driven Dynamic Deformations" with Steve Capell, Seth Green, Brian Curless, Tom Duchamp in ACM Transactions on Graphics Vol. 21 Num. 3 (SIGGRAPH 2002).[pdf] [project]
dragon with deformation controls
"A Multiresolution Framework for Dynamic Deformations" with Steve Capell, Seth Green, Brian Curless, Tom Duchamp in ACM SIGGRAPH Symposium on Computer Animation [project]
throwing a hat on a coatrack
"Interactive Manipulation of Rigid Body Simulations" with Jovan Popović, Steven Seitz, Michael Erdmann, Andy Witkin in Computer Graphics (SIGGRAPH) 2000. [pdf]
rotating broad-jump
"Physically Based Motion Transformation" with Andy Witkin in Computer Graphics (SIGGRAPH) 1999. [pdf] [project]
stepping through the door
"Motion Warping" with Andy Witkin in Computer Graphics (SIGGRAPH) 1995. [pdf] [project]

Research Projects and Interests

Large Scale Educational Campaigns.

Research in Serious Games. We are developing new genre of science-centric serious games, including games that lead to scientific discoveries in biochemistry with implications towards curing diseases, discovering vaccines, and developing novel biofuels.

Reinforcement Learning for Optimal Learning Pathways.

Methods for Automatic Synthesis of Instructional Content and Leraning Progressions.

Past Research Projects and Interests

Synthesis of Natural Control Mechanisms. We are investigating automatic methods for determining the fundamental control mechanisms that give rise to a wide variety of animal locomotion.  We are investigating human locomotion control as well as natural controllers for quadrupeds and birds in flight.

Dynamics and Control Reduction.  We are investigating control and model reduction techniques that will enable us to automatically reduce the complexity of dynamic simulators. The same techniques should also allow for custom-designed  dynamics approximations tailored for specific dynamic control problems.

Reusable Motion Libraries. Our goal is to give non-skilled computer users the ability to use computer animation as an expressive medium. The fundamental paradigm behind our approach involves the creation of motion libraries which can be easily mapped onto different characters, or modified to fit the needs of a specific animation. We model the motion as an optimal dynamic process which allows us to preserve dynamic properties of the animation during editing. This formulation also enables us to intuitively edit high-level motion concepts such as the time and placement of footprints, length and mass of various extremities or joint arrangement.

Control of Complex Dynamics. We are developing methods to control complex dynamic behavior.  We are working on control techniques for natural phenomena such as smoke, water and cloth, as well as for complex actuated dynamics of animals such as humans, birds, and various quadrupeds.

High-fidelity Digital Actors. This research aims at creating synthetic humans that look and move realistically. We are developing data driven methods to capture and reuse high-fidelity detailed dynamic motion of human skin.

Modeling Dynamic Deformation of Flexible Objects. We are developing models for interactive manipulation of flexible articulated body dynamics.  The emphasis of this projects are on realtime performance, dynamic character interaction, and effective rigging of character dynamics.

Novel Interfaces for Computer Animation. With the emergence of real-time motion capture systems we can use our whole body as a natural interface for describing motion.  We are also exploring traditional drawings as an intuitive interface for rapid prototyping of computer animations.

Affiliations

Courses

Current Students

PhD

Josh Gardner

Past Students

Graduate

Aaron Bauer (Jane Street)
Rahul Banerjee (Google)
Zuoming Shi (Microsoft)
Travis Mandel (UW Hawaii faculty)
Uldarico Muico
Alex Polozov (Microsoft Research)
Eric Butler (McGraw Hill)
Yun-En Liu (Principal Scientist, Enlearn)
Nell O’Rourke (Northwestern faculty)
Igor Mordatch (Google Brain)
Erik Andersen (Cornell faculty)
Sergey Levine (UC Berkeley faculty)
Alex Jaffe, 2013 PhD (Spry Fox)
Kevin Wampler, 2012 PhD (Adobe Research)
Seth Cooper, 2011 PhD (Northeastern faculty)
     winner ACM Dissertation Award
Yongjoon Lee, 2010 PhD (Bungie)
Seong Jae Lee, 2010 M.S. (Google)
Jia-Chi Wu, 2010 PhD (Apple)
Adrien Treuille 2008 PhD (CMU faculty, Streamlit founder)
Brett Allen, 2005 PhD (Google)
C. Karen Liu, 2005 PhD (Stanford faculty)
Antoine McNamara, 2004 M.S. (The Defender Assn)
Steve Capell, 2004 PhD (Havok)
Gary Yngve, 2003, M.S. (Facebook)
Mira Dontcheva, 2003 M.S. (Adobe Research)
Charles Gordon, 2001 M.S. (Amazon)

Postdocs

Adam Smith 2012-14 (UCSC faculty)
Sameer Agarwal (joint with Curless, Seitz, Google) 2007-09

Undergraduate

Mai Dang
Christian Lee
Emma Lynch
Stephen Sievers
Roy Szeto
Ethan Apter, 2010
Justin Irwen, 2009
Janos Barbero, 2009
Michael Beenen, 2009 (Amazon.com)
Josh Snyder
Alex Cho Snyder
Daniel Suskin
Andrew Yurowchak
Andrew Lewis, 2006 (Google)
Matthew Burkhart, 2005 (Google)
Ethel Evans, 2004
Yeuhi Abe, 2004 (PhD student, MIT)
Steve L. Martin, 2003 (PhD student, UC Berkeley)
Chris Fitzner, 2003
Matthew Chasan, 2003
Eugene Hsu, 2002 (PhD student, MIT)
Chris Twigg, 2002 (PhD student, CMU)
Dutch Meyer, 2002
Adam Kirk, 2001 (PhD student, UC Berkeley)
Kevin Audleman, 2000 (PhD student, Brown)

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