On Monday, the International Conference on Computer Animation and Social Agents (CASA) will be held at UH for three days. Founded in 1988 in Geneva, Spain, this is only the second time that the CASA conference has been hosted in the United States.
The conference will discuss advancements in computer animation such as avatars, facial animation, motion capture, virtual humans, fluid simulation, and their social impact. The conference will also feature 43 oral presentations of technical papers, four keynote talks and six workshop papers. The accepted papers have been written by researchers from 14 countries, including the U.S., Canada, China, United Kingdom, Germany, France, The Netherlands, Spain, Japan, Korea, Singapore, Brazil, Mexico and Turkey.
UH researchers contributed to 2 full papers and 2 workshop papers, and much of the event was organized with help by them. Zhigang Deng, associate professor computer science and co-chair of CASA, will be giving the welcome speech on the first day of the conference and will also be presenting a half-day tutorial on advanced skinning techniques.
“I joined UH as an assistant professor and found the UH Computer Graphics and Interactive Media Lab from scratch in 2006,” Deng said. “In the past several years, my group members have been working really hard and made many encouraging research progresses in the computer graphics and animation field.”
Assistant professor of computer science Guoning Chen will be co-organizing a workshop on the theories and techniques of structured meshing. He says that networking and collaboration with his colleagues is the most important thing for him.
“As an assistant professor, this will be my first time to serve as the workshop co-organizer,” Chen said. “There are certainly a lot of things to learn from the administrative point of view. But to me, the more valuable experience will be building the connections with your peers in the same research area, and of course, learning the latest advances of the research in the relevant areas.”
Deng sees the conference as a result of hard work and recognition of UH’s computer animation team.
“I personally take the conference to be held at UH campus as some sort of recognition to my persistent efforts at UH in the past several years,” Deng said. “In other words, I would personally interpret this event at UH as a milestone that our UH computer animation research group has been informally put on the academic map in the broad computer animation research community.”
