CITRIS Distinguished Lecture Series: Crowds and Emergent Teamwork

Craig Reynolds
Friday, January 23, 2009, 11:00 am, Room 180, Engineering 2 Building, UCSC
Hosted by CITRIS/UCSC

Abstract

Early crowd models focused on group motion, marching relentlessly toward a goal.  Newer crowd models address group behaviors beyond simplistic trudging.  Applications in games, movies, training and historical recreations require large groups of characters in less ambulatory, more social activities.  We might populate a festival with revelers, a bazaar with shoppers, or a battlefield with soldiers.  Such behaviors can often be mimicked with stochastic state machines.  More interesting are crowds with a global goal such as foraging, search or construction.  These collective behaviors have globally observable results so individual agents require more sophisticated controllers.  Inspiration for the design of such controllers can be found in the behavior of social insects and other self-organizing natural systems.  This talk will review crowd models, collective behaviors in nature, and show some recent simulation results.

Biography

Craig Reynolds researches technology for autonomous characters at Sony Computer Entertainment's US R&D group in Foster City, California (www.research.scea.com).  Projects include PSCrowd, a high performance crowd simulator for PS3, and OpenSteer, an open source library of steering behaviors.  He previously worked on production and tool development in the animation and game industries at: DreamWorks, Silicon Studio, Electronic Arts, Symbolics and Information International Inc.  He sits on the editorial boards of three scholarly journals and won a Scientific and Engineering Academy Award in 1998 for "pioneering contributions to the development of three dimensional computer animation for motion picture production."