Virtual Cityscapes: Challenges, Recent Advances, and Opportunities

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IAS / School of Engineering Joint Lecture
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Speaker:        Prof Ming C. Lin
                The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Title:          "Virtual Cityscapes: Challenges, Recent Advances,
                 and Opportunities"

Date:           18 Nov 2013 (Monday)

Time:           4:00 - 5:00 pm

Venue:          Leung Yat Sing Lecture Theater (LT-F), HKUST

Abstract:

Aggregates of numerous entities, such as a group of people and fleet of
vehicles, form complex systems that exhibit interesting biological,
social, cultural, and spatial patterns observed in nature and in society.
Modeling of the collective behaviors remains an open research challenge in
computer graphics, robotics, architecture, physics, psychology, social
sciences, and civil and traffic engineering, as complex systems often
exhibit distinct characteristics, such as emergent behaviors,
self-organization, and pattern formation, due to multi-scale interactions
among individuals and groups of individuals. Despite decades of
observation and studies, collective behaviors are particularly not well
understood for groups with non-uniform spatial distribution and
heterogeneous behavior characteristics, such as pedestrian and vehicle
traffic in urban scenes, evacuation flows in complex structures, and
coupled human-natural systems.

In this talk, the speaker will survey some recent efforts on addressing
the problem of modeling, simulating, and directing virtual agents in
complex dynamic environments. In particular, she will describe several
complementary approaches for local collision avoidance, global navigation,
and flow control of multiple entities, including both crowds and traffic,
in urban scenes and city highways. The speaker will further highlight the
challenges of designing scalable algorithms for these problems by taking
advantages of parallelism available on emerging commodity hardware, such
as graphics processing units and manycore processors. She will present
potential opportunities of modeling a dynamic cityscape and their
application in large-scale motion synthesis, and coordination of multiple
autonomous agents in computer games, virtual environments, and digital
media. Finally, the speaker will conclude by discussing our experience and
some future research directions.

About the speaker:

Prof Ming C. Lin received her PhD in Electrical Engineering and Computer
Science from the University of California at Berkeley in 1993. She joined
the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1997 and is currently
John R. & Louise S. Parker Distinguished Professor of Computer Science.
She is also an honorary Chair Professor (Yangtze Scholar) at Tsinghua
University.

Prof Lin's research interests include physically-based modeling, virtual
environments, sound rendering, haptics, robotics, and geometric computing.
She has (co-)authored more than 250 refereed publications in these areas
and co-edited/authored 4 books including Applied Computation Geometry,
High-Fidelity Haptic Rendering, Haptic Rendering: Foundations, Algorithms
and Applications and Algorithmic Foundations of Robotics. She has served
on numerous program committees of leading conferences and co-chaired a
number of international conferences and workshops. She is currently the
editor-in-chief of IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer
Graphics and a member of 6 editorial boards.

Prof Lin is a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery and the
Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). She received
numerous honors and awards including the US National Science Foundation
Young Faculty Career Award, Honda Research Initiation Award, IEEE VGTC
Virtual Reality Technical Achievement Award and eight best paper awards at
international conferences, etc.