Bio: Jehee Lee is a professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at Seoul National University. His research interests are in the areas of computer graphics, animation, biomechanics, and robotics. He is particularly interested in developing new ways of understanding, representing, planning, and simulating human and animal movements. This involves full-body motion analysis and synthesis, biped control and simulation, clinical gait analysis, motion capture, motion planning, data-driven and physically based techniques, interactive avatar control, crowd simulation, and controller design. He co-chaired ACM/EG Symposium on Computer Animation in 2012 and served on numerous program committees, including ACM SIGGRAPH, ACM SIGGRAPH Asia, ACM/EG Symposium on Computer Animation, Pacific Graphics, CGI, and CASA. He is currently an associate editor of IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics. He is leading the SNU Movement Research Lab.

Abstract:The animation and simulation of human/animal behavior is an important issue in the context of computer animation, games, robotics, and virtual environments. The study on human movements and animal locomotion has revealed various principles based on physics, biomechanics, physiology, and psychology.  Many of existing animation techniques rely on those principles, which may be described as mathematical equations, algorithms, or procedures. Another stream of research, called data-driven animation, made use of human motion data captured from live actors. The research on data-driven animation has developed a variety of techniques to edit, manipulate, segment and splice motion capture clips. Those techniques are eventually used to synthesize the motion of multiple interacting characters in complex virtual environments. The current trend of animation research is to combine these two approaches to complement each other. Over the past few years, we have explored several methods that addressed the problem of simulating human/animal behaviors in virtual environments.  Each solution relies on different principles of human movements and motion data captured at different scales. We found that principles and observed data can interact with each other to solve challenging control problems. In this talk, we will discuss the design of physically based controllers that simulate the locomotion of a muscle-actuated biped and the flapping flight of a bird with deformable feathers