Heterogeneous hierarchical workflow composition

Workflow systems promise scientists an automated end-to-end path from hypothesis to discovery. However, expecting any single workflow system to deliver such a wide range of capabilities is impractical. A more practical solution is to compose the end-to-end workflow from more than one system. With this goal in mind, the integration of task-based and in situ workflows is explored, where the result is a hierarchical heterogeneous workflow composed of subworkflows, with different levels of the hierarchy using different programming, execution, and data models. Materials science use cases demonstrate the advantages of such heterogeneous hierarchical workflow composition.This work is a collaboration between Argonne National Laboratory and the Barcelona Supercomputing Center within the Joint Laboratory for Extreme-Scale Computing. This research is supported by the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Science, Office of Advanced Scientific Computing Research, under contract number DE-AC02- 06CH11357, program manager Laura Biven, and by the Spanish Government (SEV2015-0493), by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation (contract TIN2015-65316-P), by Generalitat de Catalunya (contract 2014-SGR-1051).Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Overview of crowd simulation in computer graphics

High-powered technology use computer graphics in education, entertainment, games, simulation, and virtual heritage applications has led it to become an important area of research. In simulation, according to Tecchia et al. (2002), it is important to create an interactive, complex, and realistic virtual world so that the user can have an immersive experience during navigation through the world. As the size and complexity of the environments in the virtual world increased, it becomes more necessary to populate them with peoples, and this is the reason why rendering the crowd in real-time is very crucial. Generally, crowd simulation consists of three important areas. They are realism of behavioral (Thompson and Marchant 1995), high-quality visualization (Dobbyn et al. 2005) and convergence of both areas. Realism of behavioral is mainly used for simple 2D visualizations because most of the attentions are concentrated on simulating the behaviors of the group. High quality visualization is regularly used for movie productions and computer games. It gives intention on producing more convincing visual rather than realism of behaviors. The convergences of both areas are mainly used for application like training systems. In order to make the training system more effective, the element of valid replication of the behaviors and high-quality visualization is added

Human motion modeling and simulation by anatomical approach

To instantly generate desired infinite realistic human motion is still a great challenge in virtual human simulation. In this paper, the novel emotion effected motion classification and anatomical motion classification are presented, as well as motion capture and parameterization methods. The framework for a novel anatomical approach to model human motion in a HTR (Hierarchical Translations and Rotations) file format is also described. This novel anatomical approach in human motion modelling has the potential to generate desired infinite human motion from a compact motion database. An architecture for the real-time generation of new motions is also propose

Improving games AI performance using grouped hierarchical level of detail

Computer games are increasingly making use of large environments; however, these are often only sparsely populated with autonomous agents. This is, in part, due to the computational cost of implementing behaviour functions for large numbers of agents. In this paper we present an optimisation based on level of detail which reduces the overhead of modelling group behaviours, and facilitates the population of an expansive game world. We consider an environment which is inhabited by many distinct groups of agents. Each group itself comprises individual agents, which are organised using a hierarchical tree structure. Expanding and collapsing nodes within each tree allows the efficient dynamic abstraction of individuals, depending on their proximity to the player. Each branching level represents a different level of detail, and the system is designed to trade off computational performance against behavioural fidelity in a way which is both efficient and seamless to the player. We have developed an implementation of this technique, and used it to evaluate the associated performance benefits. Our experiments indicate a significant potential reduction in processing time, with the update for the entire AI system taking less than 1% of the time required for the same number of agents without optimisation

Real-time motion data annotation via action string

Even though there is an explosive growth of motion capture data, there is still a lack of efficient and reliable methods to automatically annotate all the motions in a database. Moreover, because of the popularity of mocap devices in home entertainment systems, real-time human motion annotation or recognition becomes more and more imperative. This paper presents a new motion annotation method that achieves both the aforementioned two targets at the same time. It uses a probabilistic pose feature based on the Gaussian Mixture Model to represent each pose. After training a clustered pose feature model, a motion clip could be represented as an action string. Then, a dynamic programming-based string matching method is introduced to compare the differences between action strings. Finally, in order to achieve the real-time target, we construct a hierarchical action string structure to quickly label each given action string. The experimental results demonstrate the efficacy and efficiency of our method

A survey of real-time crowd rendering

In this survey we review, classify and compare existing approaches for real-time crowd rendering. We first overview character animation techniques, as they are highly tied to crowd rendering performance, and then we analyze the state of the art in crowd rendering. We discuss different representations for level-of-detail (LoD) rendering of animated characters, including polygon-based, point-based, and image-based techniques, and review different criteria for runtime LoD selection. Besides LoD approaches, we review classic acceleration schemes, such as frustum culling and occlusion culling, and describe how they can be adapted to handle crowds of animated characters. We also discuss specific acceleration techniques for crowd rendering, such as primitive pseudo-instancing, palette skinning, and dynamic key-pose caching, which benefit from current graphics hardware. We also address other factors affecting performance and realism of crowds such as lighting, shadowing, clothing and variability. Finally we provide an exhaustive comparison of the most relevant approaches in the field.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

The Actions and Feelings Questionnaire in Autism and Typically Developed Adults

Open access via Springer Compact Agreement We are grateful to Simon Baron-Cohen and Paula Smith of the Cambridge Autism Centre for the use of the ARC database in distributing the questionnaire, to all participants for completing it, to Eilidh Farquar for special efforts in distributing the link and to Gemma Matthews for advice on using AMOS 23. JHGW is supported by the Northwood Trust.Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Zero-gravity movement studies

The use of computer graphics to simulate the movement of articulated animals and mechanisms has a number of uses ranging over many fields. Human motion simulation systems can be useful in education, medicine, anatomy, physiology, and dance. In biomechanics, computer displays help to understand and analyze performance. Simulations can be used to help understand the effect of external or internal forces. Similarly, zero-gravity simulation systems should provide a means of designing and exploring the capabilities of hypothetical zero-gravity situations before actually carrying out such actions. The advantage of using a simulation of the motion is that one can experiment with variations of a maneuver before attempting to teach it to an individual. The zero-gravity motion simulation problem can be divided into two broad areas: human movement and behavior in zero-gravity, and simulation of articulated mechanisms