DemetriT111509

From PodcastWiki

   Date: Sun, 15 Nov 2009 14:59:10 -0800
   From: Demetri Terzopoulos
Subject: Re: [Biota] Looking for artificial life courses
     To: tom@nobleape.com

Hi Tom,

I teach an ALife course at UCLA. Unfortunately, our course pages are not accessible from outside the campus, but here is the description from the CS course catalog:

CS275. Artificial Life for Computer Graphics and Vision.

Lecture, four hours; outside study, eight hours. Letter grading. Enforced requisite: course CS174A. Recommended: course CS161.

Investigation of the important role that concepts from artificial life, an emerging discipline that spans computational and biological sciences, can play in the construction of advanced computer graphics and vision models for virtual reality, animation, interactive games, active vision, visual sensor networks, medical image analysis, etc. Focus on comprehensive models that can realistically emulate variety of living things (plants and animals) from lower animals to humans. Exposure to effective computational modeling of natural phenomena of life and their incorporation into sophisticated, self-animating graphical entities. Specific topics include modeling plants using L-systems, biomechanical simulation and control, behavioral animation, reinforcement and neural-network learning of locomotion, cognitive modeling, artificial animals and humans, human facial animation, and artificial evolution.

Professor Michael Dyer teaches another ALife course in CS at UCLA:

CS263C. Animats-Based Modeling.

Lecture, four hours; outside study, eight hours. Letter grading. Requisite: course CS130 or CS131 or CS161.

Animats are mobile/sensing animal-like software agents embedded in simulated dynamic environments. Emphasis on modeling: goal-oriented behavior via neurocontrollers, adaptation via reinforcement learning, evolutionary programming. Animat-based tasks include foraging, mate finding, predation, navigation, predator avoidance, cooperative nest construction, communication, and parenting.

Best wishes --Demetri

Demetri Terzopoulos
Chancellor's Professor of Computer Science
University of California, Los Angeles
Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science
Computer Science Department
www.cs.ucla.edu/~dt