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  • [2017] In Fall 2017, welcome the following new members to join our group: Robert Jackson (PhD student), Kunpeng Zhang (MS-thesis student), Tijian Cai (visiting scholar from ECJTU/China), and Fengping Yang (visiting scholar from ECJTU/China).
  • [2017] Our paper (co-authored with Xifeng Gao (former PhD student), Prof. Guoning Chen, and Colleagues at New York University and Hong Kong University) titled “Robust Structure Simplification for Hex Re-meshing” was conditionally accepted to ACM SIGGRAPH Asia 2017 Conference as a full technical paper.
  • [2017] Our paper (co-authored with Colleagues at Zhejiang University, China) titled “Topologically Consistent Leafy Tree Morphing” received the “Best Paper Award” on International Conference on Computer Animation and Social Agents (CASA) 2017 which was hold at South Korea in May 2017.
  • [2017] Our paper (co-authored by Yu Ding, Yuting Zhang, Meihua Xiao, and Zhigang Deng) titled “A Multifaceted Study on Eye Contact based Speaker Identification in Three-party Conversations” was accepted to ACM CHI 2017 Conference as a full research paper. ACM CHI Conference is the premier venue in human computer interaction field. Dr. Ding will attend the conference to present the work.
  • [2016] Prof. Deng is promoted to FULL Professor of Computer Science at University of Houston (main campus), effective on 9/1/2016!
  • [2016] Prof. Deng, together with Prof. Chen, receives a DoD DURIP grant to acquire scalable visual computing research infrastructure at University of Houston, including large-scale wall display and walking VR system.
  • [2016] Welcome Dr. Yu Ding (PhD from Télécom Paristech, Paris, France) to join our group as a postDoc since March 2016.
  • [2015] Prof. Deng receives a Faculty Academic Excellence Award from the Department of Computer Science at University of Houston in 2015 for his extraordinary academic achievements.
  • [2015] Prof. Deng (as the PI) receives a NSF research grant on “Digitally Mediated Multiparty Conversation: Acquisition, Modeling and Evaluation” starting at 9/1/2015. More information of this research grant can be found at the link here.
  • [2015] Prof. Deng is elevated to an ACM Senior Member since May 2015.
  • [2015] Our paper “Hexahedral Mesh Re-parameterization from Aligned Base Domains” (authored by Xifeng Gao, Zhigang Deng, and Guoning Chen) is accepted to ACM SIGGRAPH 2015 technical paper program, the premier conference for computer graphics and interactive techniques.- It introduce a first and complete pipeline to optimize the global structure of a hex-mesh, by identifying and removing those valid removal base-complex sheets that contain misaligned singularities.
  • [2015] Xifeng Gao receives a “Best PhD Student Award” from UH Computer Science Department in recognition of his outstanding academic achievements in May 2015.
  • [2014] Prof. Deng receives a “Certificate of Excellence” in recognition of extraordinary achievements from College of Natural Sciences and Mathematics at University of Houston, during the Provost’s 2014 award recognition luncheon.
  • [2014] Prof. Deng is a co-recipient of the “Ten Year Technical Impact Award” on ACM International Conference on Multimodal Interaction (ICMI) 2014 Conference (the premier conference on multimodal interaction), for his co-authored ICMI 2004 paper “Analysis of emotion recognition using facial expressions, speech and multimodal information“.
  • [2014] Congratulations to Binh H. Le (6th PhD from the group) who recently successfully defended his PhD Dissertation “Example-based Rigging and Real-time Animation of Characters with Linear Skinning Models”. Binh will join the Disney Research at Pittsburgh in August 2014 as a PostDoc Researcher. Also, welcome Shen Chen (from China) join the lab as a new PhD student in Fall 2014 semester!
  • [2014] Prof. Deng will serve as a Conference General Co-Chair of ACM SIGGRAPH/Eurographics Symposium on Computer Animation (SCA) 2015 that will be held at Los Angeles, CA (co-located with ACM SIGGRAPH 2015). The other general co-chair of SCA 2015 is Prof. Jernej Barbic at USC. The two program co-chairs for SCA 2015 are Dr. Florence Bertails-Descoubes and Dr. Stelian Coros. SCA is the premier conference on computer animation. Here is the official SCA 2015 website.

  • [2014] Prof. Deng serve as a guest co-editor of the Multimedia Tools and Applications Journal (Springer) upcoming special issue on “Expressive Talking Avatars Synthesis and Animation”.

  • [2014] Prof. Deng receive a Best Reviewer Award from IEEE International Conference on Multimedia and Expo (ICME) 2014 that is held at Chengdu, China in July 2014.
  • [2014] Prof. Deng will co-instruct a half-day course “Skinning: Real-time Shape Deformation” (together with Alec Jacobson at Columbia University, Ladislav Kavan at University of Pennsylvania, and J.P Lewis at Weta Digital/Willington University of Victoria, New Zealand) on the ACM SIGGRAPH 2014 Annual Conference, the premier conference for computer graphics and interactive techniques.
  • [2014] Our paper “Robust and Accurate Skeletal Rigging from Mesh Sequences” (authored by Binh H. Le and Zhigang Deng) is accepted to ACM SIGGRAPH 2014 technical paper program, the premier conference for computer graphics and interactive techniques.- It introduce an example-based rigging approach to automatically generate linear blend skinning models with skeletal structure. The output can be directly used to set up skeleton-based animation in various 3D modeling and animation software as well as game engines. Visit its project page for full paper and demo video.
  • [2014] Prof. Deng was appointed an Adjunct Associate Professor at School of Biomedical Informatics at the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston.
  • [2014] Starting from April 2014, Prof. Deng will serve as an Associate Editor of the Computer Graphics Forum Journal (the official publication of Eurographics).

  • [2013] Our NIH project is featured in the Fall/Winter 2013 issue of the Breakthrough Newsletter (NSM Newsletter for alumni and friends). Here is the full article link. Thanks Xifeng Gao and Cheng Chen for the photos.

  • [2013] Prof. Deng was quoted in a recent news article on fuelfix.com (a daily news service for energy business), titled ‘Augmented reality’ turns animation into oil business tool. Here is the article link.
  • [2013] Prof. Deng receives an Overseas and Hong Kong/Macau Young Scholars Collaborative Research Award (formerly Overseas Distinguished Young Scholar) from the National Natural Science Foundation of China (A.K.A NSF of China) to conduct computer animation collaborative research with Zhejiang University, China.
  • [2013] Prof. Deng and four PhD students (Binh Le, Li Wei, Xifeng Gao, and Mario Rincon) attended the ACM SIGGRAPH 2013 conference at Anaheim, CA in July 2013. During the conference, Binh presented one technical paper on Siggraph 2013 main conference and another paper on SCA 2013 conference; Mario presented his research poster on Siggraph 2013 conference.

  • [2013] As a Conference General Co-chair, Prof. Deng will co-host the 27th International Conference on Computer Animation and Social Agents (CASA) 2014 in May at Houston, Texas. Here is its “call for papers” and the conference website.

  • [2013] Prof. Deng is invited to join the editorial board of the Computer Animation and Virtual Worlds (CAVW) Journal by Wiley Press as an Associate Editor. The CAVW Journal is one of the leading journals delicately focused on computer animation publications.

  • [2013] Two PhD students, Binh Le and Li Wei, will do the summer research internship at Nokia Research (Silicon Valley) and Qualcomm Research (San Diego) at 2013 summer, respectively.
  • [2013] Congratulations to Binh Le for winning the 2013 “Friends of NSM” Fellowship, which is the highest honor for graduate students at UH NSM.
  • [2013] Our recent IEEE Computer paper titled “Characterizing the Performance and Power Consumption of 3D Mobile Games” (April 2013 issue) is featured on the UH CS department website. Check the full story here.

  • [2013] Congratulations to Binh Le, Xifeng Gao, and Chrysanthi Chaleva Ntina for winning annual department graduate student awards! Here is the department news about these awards.- Binh H Le receives UH CS Department 2013 “Best PhD Student” Award.- Xifeng Gao receives UH CS Department 2013 “Best Junior PhD Student” Award.- Chrysanthi Chaleva Ntina receives UH CS Department 2013 “Best MS Thesis Student” Award.
    • [2013] Prof. Deng is a co-recipient of 2013 University of Houston Teaching Excellence Award for group teaching excellence in game design education, which is the highest teaching excellence honor given by the University of Houston. Here is the UH NSM News and Department News about this teaching award.- Together with C. Yun, O. Johnson, J. Baez, Prof. Deng co-founded the UH Game Design program. In the past several years, student teams at the UH Game program have consistently shown strong performance in the annual Microsoft Imagine Cup Game Design US Competition, including: the 2nd and 3rd places in 2010 US competition; the 1st and 2nd place (mobile game category) and the 3rd place (PC/XBox category) in 2011 competition; and the 3rd place (mobile game category) and the 4th place (PC/XBox category) in 2012 competition.

  • [2013] Our paper “Two-layer sparse compression of dense weight blend skinning” (authored by Binh H. Le and Zhigang Deng) is accepted to ACM SIGGRAPH 2013 technical paper program, the premier conference for computer graphics and interactive techniques.- It introduces an efficient two-layer sparse compression technique to substantially reduce the computational cost of a dense-weight skinning model, with insignificant loss of its visual quality. Visit its project page for full paper and demo video.
  • [2013] Prof. Deng receives an NIH grant to develop a novel interactive virtual environment to engage children with more physical activities. This research is in collaboration with Baylor College of Medicine behavioral medicine researchers.
  • [2013] Congratulations to Nikhil Navkar (5th PhD from the group) takes the position of R&D Executive at Qatar Robotic Surgery Center.
  • [2012] Our paper “A Framework for Integrating real-time MRI with Robot Control: Application to Simulated Transapical Cardiac Interventions” is accepted to IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Engineering (TBME). This paper is the master piece of Nikhil Navkar’s PhD Thesis.- It introduces a novel framework for performing robot-assisted interventions with real-time Magnetic Resonance Imaging (rtMRI) guidance. Visit its full paper.
  • [2012] Our paper “Smooth Skinning Decomposition with rigid bones” (authored by Binh H. Le and Zhigang Deng) is accepted to SIGGRAPH Asia 2012 technical paper program. It is also selected into SIGGRAPH Asia 2012 Technical Papers Video Trailer.- It introduces an automated SSDR algorithm to extract the linear blend skinning (LBS) from a set of example poses. The SSDR model can effectively approximate the skin deformation of nearly articulated models as well as highly deformable models by a low number of rigid bones and a sparse, convex bone-vertex weight map. Visit its project page for full paper and demo video.
  • [2012] Our paper “Visual and Force-Feedback Guidance for Robot-Assisted Interventions in the Beating Heart with Real-Time MRI” (authored by N. Navkar, Z. Deng, D. J. Shah, K. Berkis and N. V. Tsekos) has been selected as the Runner-up of the Best Medical Robotics Paper Award at IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) 2012, which is one of leading venues in robotics.
  • [2012] Prof. Deng serves as a guest co-editor for the Springer Multimedia Tools and Application Journal special issue on “multimodal joint information processing in human machine interaction: algorithms, applications and new trends”.
  • [2012] Prof. Deng is promoted to an Associate Professor with tenure at Department of Computer Science at University of Houston. Here is the official department announcement.