DCS talk: Adrien Treuille from U of Washington

Today there is a talk from Adriene Treuille from University of Washington called "New approaches to modeling and control of complex dynamics". Abstract of his talk is below.

Complex phenomena such as animal morphology, human motion, and large
fluid systems challenge even our most sophisticated simulation and
control techniques. My overarching research goal has been to develop
fundamentally new methods to approach such high-dimensional and
nonlinear problems. This talk presents my work solving these problems
across a wide range of phenomena, including a new model-reduction
approach to fluids that is orders-of-magnitude faster than standard
simulation methods and enables interactive high-resolution fluid
simulation for the first time. Another example is a continuum
approach to crowd dynamics which efficiently reproduces empirical
aspects of large crowd behavior that would be difficult or impossible
to achieve with traditional agent models. The talk will also cover
work on several other phenomena including human animation, animal
morphology, and protein folding. Such new algorithmic approaches
advance not only our ability to simulate and control complex systems
but also our understanding of the systems themselves.

Bio: Adrien Treuille is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of
Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Washington. He
received a M.S. degree in Computer Science from the University of
Washington, and a B.S. degree in Computer Science from Georgetown
University. Adrien's research interests include computer graphics,
optimization, model reduction, control, biomechanics, and recently,
biochemistry.

What seems fascinating about his talk is the modeling of crowds like for example how crowds form in metropolitan cities, and how this can be mathematically simulated which closely resembles what naturally happens. Also, what was really cool was how he modelled and showed a simulation of human motion. Even though graphics is not really my research area, it's just neat to see how graphics works.