Christopher Peters 

RESEARCH INTERESTS

Embodied Agents and Crowds in Real and Virtual Settings:
Behaviour Analysis, Synthesis, Perception and Human Interaction

indicates some of my favourite research work, with downloads/links provided where possible

	Crowd Modelling and Human Perception in Urban Environments Analysis of real crowd scenes in urban settings and their subsequent virtual reconstruction and modification in order to conduct perceptual comparisons of behaviour. Studies highlight the importance of the urban context in which crowd configurations and behaviour is perceived on the impact of human ratings of naturalness. Ennis, C., Peters, C. and O' Sullivan, C. "Perceptual effects of scene context and viewpoint for virtual pedestrian crowds", ACM Transactions on Applied Perception, 8(2):10, February 2011 Peters, C. and Ennis, C. "Modelling groups of plausible virtual pedestrians", IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications, Special Issue on Virtual Populace, vol. 29, no. 4, pp. 54 - 63, July/Aug, 2009    [pdf] Ennis, C., Peters, C., and O' Sullivan, C. "Perceptual evaluation of position and orientation context rules for pedestrian formations", APGV'08: Proceedings of the 5th ACM SIGGRAPH Symposium on Applied Perception in Graphics and Visualization, Los Angeles, CA, pp. 75-82, August 2008   Peters, C., Ennis, C., McDonnell R., and O' Sullivan, C. "Crowds in context: Evaluating the perceptual plausibility of pedestrian orientations", In Short Papers Proceedings of Eurographics 2008, Crete, Greece, 2008
	Perspective-taking and "Perceptual" Theory of Mind Investigation of the impact of the directionality and orientation of agent body parts on the ability to draw attention or cue objects to viewers. Applications for modelling the perspective of another interactor in virtual environments e.g. in order to aid intelligent systems in interaction initiation. Peters, C., Qureshi, A. and Apperly, I.A. "Effects of gaze direction of a virtual agent in an online communication game". European Society of Philosophy and Psychology, Ruhr-Universitat Bochum, Germany, August 2010    [pdf] Peters, C. "A perceptually-based theory of mind model for agent interaction initiation", International Journal of Humanoid Robotics (IJHR), Special Issue: Achieving Human-Like Qualities in Interactive Virtual and Physical Humanoids, 3(3), pp. 321-340, World Scientific Publishing, 2006 Peters, C. "Direction of attention perception for conversation initiation in virtual environments", in Intelligent Virtual Agents, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Springer Berlin / Heidelberg, v.3661/2005, ISBN 978-3-540-28738-4, pages 215-228, 2005
	Gaze Generation based on Computational Visual Attention and Novelty Generation of sensible and credible gaze shifts for virtual agents using bottom-up models of visual attention (based on synthetic vision and memory capabilities - see below) operating in the virtual environment. Goal is to create agents that can look around at salient or otherwise novel aspects of their virtual environment, and validated through comparison with human scan-paths. Peters, C. and Qureshi, A. "A head movement propensity model for animating gaze shifts and blinks of virtual characters". Computers and Graphics, Elsevier, 2010, doi:10.1016/j.cag.2010.09.007    [pdf] Peters, C. “Animating gaze shifts for virtual characters based on head movement propensity”, IEEE International Conference on Games and Virtual Worlds for Serious Applications, Portugal, March 2010      Best paper award Peters, C., and Grandjean, D. "A visual novelty detection component for virtual agents", In T. J. Paletta, L., editor, Proceedings of the Fifth International Workshop on Attention and Performance in Computational Vision (WAPCV), pp. 289-300, Santorini, Greece, May 2008    [pdf]
	Human Gaze Detection and Visual Attention in Virtual Environments Use of eye-tracking and vision techniques for detecting the focus of attention and gaze of a human in real-time in order to interact with an embodied conversational agent. One goal of this ongoing research has been to create a cheap, fast and fairly robust gaze tracker in collaboration with the National Technical University Athens, allowing interaction to take place in a natural manner without the need for head-mounted equipment. Peters, C., Asteriadis, S. and Karpouzis, K. "Investigating shared attention with a virtual agent using a gaze-based interface", Springer Journal on Multimodal User Interfaces, (JMUI), Springer, 2009 Peters, C., and O' Sullivan, C. "Attention-driven eye gaze and blinking for virtual humans", SIGGRAPH '03: ACM SIGGRAPH Sketches and Applications, ACM, San Diego, California, 2003   Peters, C., "Bottom-up visual attention for autonomous virtual human animation", PhD Thesis, Department of Computer Science, Trinity College Dublin, 2004
	Social Interaction Modelling with Conversational Agents Use of the agent's expressive capabilities (facial expression, gesture, speech), detected and interpreted human state (i.e. gaze and interest) and aspects of the interaction context in order to establish an affective and attentive loop with the human.  Peters, C., Castellano, G. and de Freitas, S. "An exploration of user engagement in HCI", Proceedings of the Affect-Aware Virtual Agents and Social Robots (AFFINE)   Peters, C. "Designing an emotional and attentive virtual infant", A. Paiva, R. Prada, R. W. Picard (Eds.), Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on Affective Computing and Intelligent Interaction (ACII), Lisbon, Portugal, September 12-14, 2007, Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS), Vol. 4738, pp. 386-397, 2007 Peters, C., Pelachaud, C., Bevacqua, E., Mancini, M., and Poggi, I. "A model of attention and interest using gaze behavior", in Intelligent Virtual Agents, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Springer Berlin / Heidelberg, v.3661/2005, ISBN 978-3-540-28738-4, pages 229-240, 2005 Workshop, International Conference on Multimodal Interfaces and Workshop on Machine Learning for Multimodal Interaction (ICMI-MLMI'09), Boston, MA, USA, November 6, 2009
	Synthetic Vision and Memory for Virtual Agents in VR Environments Basis for allowing virtual agents to "perceive" their virtual environments, not only to conduct visibility/occlusion queries, but to support both spatial and object-based scene processing - important concepts for simplifying some memory operations and providing extended visual attention capabilities by allowing both visual features and object characteristics/semantics to be processed. Peters, C. "An object-based memory for supporting attentive virtual agents", Artificial Intelligence and the Simulation of Behaviour Convention (AISB), Symposium: Remembering Who We Are – Human Memory For Artificial Agents, 2010 Peters, C. "Designing synthetic memory systems for supporting autonomous embodied agent behaviour", The 15th IEEE International Symposium on Robot and Human Interactive Communication (RO-MAN), pp. 14-19, Hatfield, 2006    [pdf] Peters, C., and O' Sullivan, C. "Synthetic vision and memory for autonomous virtual humans", Computer Graphics Forum, 21(4), pp. 743-752, 2002
	Computer Graphics Education and Curriculum Development Development of computer graphics modules with learning outcomes to ensure students have the attitudes and practical skills necessary for industrial employment and to engage in further education by focusing on an activity-led approach to pedagogy. Anderson, E.F. and Peters, C. "No more reinventing the virtual wheel: Middleware for use in computer games and interactive computer graphics education", Eurographics 2010 - Education Papers, Norrkoping, Sweden, Eurographics 2010 - Education Track, pp. 33-40, Norrkoping, Sweden, May 2010 Shuttleworth, J., Every., P., Anderson, E., Halloran, J., Peters, C., and Liarokapis, F. "Press play: An experiment in creative computing using a novel pedagogic approach", AngloHigher, ISSN 2041-8469, Volume 2, Issue 1, pp.23-24, Jan 2010 Anderson, E.F. and Peters, C. "On the provision of a comprehensive computer graphics education in the context of computer games", Eurographics 2009 - Education Papers, pp. 7-14, Eurographics Association, Munich, Germany, March 2009    [pdf]