We would like to acknowledge various research supports from:

Facial Animation Computer-generated faces and avatars have been increasingly used in a variety of applications including entertainment, computer-mediated communication, video games, virtual reality, human computer interaction, interactive media, etc. In this research direction, we focus on how to efficiently synthesize realistic 3D talking faces with various human-like facial expressions on the fly, how to generate virtual faces with highly-believable personified characteristics, how to intuitively edit and interact with virtual faces, and how to automatically transfer facial motions between various facial forms. Character Animation Virtual humans and character animations have extensive applications in entertainment industry, such as films and games. However, due to rich styles and subtlety of human motions, accurately and efficiently animating 3D virtual humans still remains a challenging research problem. In this research direction, we focus on how to create realistic and personalized 3D human models, and how to animate 3D virtual humans, and developing efficient algorithms to deal with huge human motion data including motion processing, analysis, and retrieval. Context-Aware HCI Embodied Conversational Agents (ECAs) have attracted a lot of attention from HCI community. In this direction, we focus on developing cognitive interaction models for engaging avatars and computational systems for multi-modal human computer interaction, and evaluate various human factors in computer systems. Visualization Systems and Algorithms Scientific and medical visualization is an interdisciplinary research area by applying computational methods to a large amount of domain-specific dataset including medical images, biological data, computational fluids data, etc. In this direction, we are interested in developing novel visualization algorithsm to intuitively explore high dimensional temporal data (e.g., human motion data) and biological and medical dataset acquired at a small scale level (e.g., at a microscopic, molecular, or genomic level). Sketching-based Interfaces for Modeling and Animation Creating 3D models is often a tedious process involved with intensive human efforts. Furthermore, interacting with computational systems using the traditional mouse+keyboard way is not always efficient in many scenarios. In this direction, we focus on developing efficient and intuitive systems for crafting various 3D models using a 2D or 3D sketching and novel schemes for interacting with computer systems using sketching.

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