Abstract: In this talk, I will focus on algorithms for capturing and controlling the motion of humans -- both animated and robotic. I will frame these topics in the context of my career which has evolved from robotics to animation and most recently back to robotics. I have explored how to control a robot to allow it to run up and down stairs, jump over obstacles, and perform a flip. In computer animation, I first worked on physical simulations of humans and then investigated techniques for generalizing captured human data as well as novel forms of capture. Recently, I have returned to robotics, looking now at algorithms for the dynamic control of a full humanoid.
Bio:
Jessica Hodgins joined the Robotics Institute and Computer Science
Department at Carnegie Mellon University as a Associate Professor
in the fall of 2000. She is now a Professor in computer science and
robotics, Associate Director for the Faculty in the Robotics Institute
as well as the part-time Director of a new industrial research
laboratory, Disney Research, Pittsburgh. Prior to moving to CMU,
she was an an Associate Professor and Assistant Dean in the College
of Computing at Georgia Institute of Technology. She received her
Ph.D. in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University in 1989.
She has received a NSF Young Investigator Award, a Packard Fellowship,
and a Sloan Fellowship. She was editor-in-chief of ACM Transactions
on Graphics from 2000-2002 and Papers Chair for ACM SIGGRAPH 2003.
8:45-9:45am Saturday, Gilda Garreton, Sun Microsystems
How Open Source and Collaboration aid Innovation in VLSI
Abstract:
Using the example of Sun Microsystems Laboratories, this presentation
shows how research in industrial labs often spans multiple research
areas and encourages close collaboration between groups. The
presentation will focus on one particular innovation that was made
possible by a joint effort of hardware and software engineers, namely
Proximity Communication, a novel low-power chip-to-chip communication
method developed at Sun Microsystems Laboratories. Furthermore, the
presentation will explain the research and circuit design flow process
that lead to the development of functional test chips. It will also
emphasize the relevance of an in-house open-source CAD tool as well as
interactions with external partners.
The in-house open-source CAD tool is called Electric and it is a Java
application used as a VLSI research framework at Sun and universities .
Electric is in use at hundreds of sites around the world and has been
used to produce thousands of integrated circuits.
In this technical talk, analysis and routing/placement tools in VLSI and
the current effort to parallelize their algorithms will be described. To
demonstrate the importance of multi-disciplinary collaboration while
innovating, a three-dimensional viewer built in Electric will be
discussed including its relevance as a teaching aid in VLSI courses.
Bio:
Gilda Garreton is a senior staff engineer at Sun Microsystems
Laboratories and her main research focuses on VLSI CAD algorithms. Since
2008, she is investigating alternative methods to multi-thread VLSI
tools. Previous to Sun, Gilda researched on 2D/3D mesh generation
algorithms suitable for device and process simulation. Gilda is an Open
Source advocate and a Java/C++ developer. She received her B.A. and
Engineering degree with honors from the Catholic University of Chile
(PUC) and her Ph.D. from the Swiss Institute of Technology, Zurich
(ETHZ). She joined Sun Microsystems Laboratories in 2004 and previously
worked as a consultant at the Catholic University of Chile and as IT
analyst/project manager at UBS, a Swiss bank in Zurich and Stamford, CT.
Gilda is a mentor at Sun and MentorNet and she co-founded in 2006 the
community Latinas in Computing (LiC) whose main goal is to promote
leadership and professional development among Latinas in the field. In
2009, Gilda and Latinas in Computing were honored by Caminos Pathways
and the City of San Francisco for their diversity work. She has been
served as GHCI Industrial advisory and scholarship board member multiple
times. During her free time, she enjoys family time with her husband and
two little boys and volunteer work. Apart from being member of
technology committee and web master at her son's primary school, she is
a member of Engineers Without Borders US, affiliation Sun where she
leads a project that would provide wireless access to a remote location
in Panama.
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