SEMINAR:AI-driven Socially Interactive 3D Digital Humans

Guest: Zerrin Yumak, Utrecht University

Title: AI-driven Socially Interactive 3D Digital Humans

Date/Time: 16 April 2024, 13:40-14:30

Zoom: https://sabanciuniv.zoom.us/j/6578435481

Abstract: With the recent advancements in computer graphics, 3D virtual humans reached to a level of very high appearance realism. They take place in a range of applications such as games, chatbots for customer service and finance, simulations for education and healthcare, remote communication and (social) XR. Yet, their interactivity and movement is limited. We as humans are very receptive of non-verbal behaviors when we engage in social and emotional interactions. In order to interact with virtual humans naturally, 3D digital humans should also be equipped with non-verbal communication skills such as facial expressions, gestures and gaze. As they take place in more interactive applications, the demand to automatically generate their behavior on-the-fly increases. This talk will discuss the role of AI and machine learning algorithms to generate the behavior and movement of virtual humans i.e. using motion capture technology. I will present the state-of-the-art and some of our research on socially interactive virtual humans.

Bio: Dr. Zerrin Yumak is an assistant professor in the Information and Computing Sciences Department at Utrecht University in the Netherlands. She is the director of the Motion Capture and Virtual Reality Lab (https://www.uu.nl/mocapvrlab). She has more than 15 years of experience in the area of believable virtual humans and social robots, in particular on non-verbal behavior synthesis, multi-party interaction and emotion and memory modeling. She obtained her PhD from University of Geneva, Switzerland. She did her post-doc at Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne and Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. She has been the Associate Editor of Visual Computer and Computer Animation and Virtual Worlds journals and she is the program committee member and reviewer of several conferences such as ACM Siggraph (Asia), Symposium on Computer Animation (SCA), Motion and Interaction In Games (MIG) and Intelligent Virtual Agents (IVA). She was the program chair of Computer Animation and Social Agents and MOCO conferences. She co-organized several workshops such as MASSXR@IEEEVR (Multi-modal affective and Social Behavior Analysis and Synthesis in Extended Reality (MASSXR). Her papers received multiple awards. She is the co-organizer of the Embodied AI initiative at Utrecht University.