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GRASP Seminar Series: Spring 2008
May 30, 11:00 a.m., TBA
Ruzena Bajcsy
University of California Berkeley
"Digital Choreography - The Road to IT Creativity"
Abstract: Dance choreography is a system of techniques used to create new dances. Creating a new dance requires choreographer/dancers to engage with inner motivations to express feelings as well as to dialogue with the external environment, whether that be visual, aural, tactile, or kinesthetic environmental stimulus on a stage or in a laboratory. The choreographer devises body movements using internal and external cues to express feelings and concepts, from the most abstract ideas to very concrete human situations in a highly creative manner, wherein a body or bodies in time and space are the central tools of this choreographic process.
Choreography is simultaneously deeply abstract and physical. Imagine a moment when a dancer enters into a 3D tele-immersive (3DTI) room surrounded by multiple 3D digital cameras and displays, where internal and external cues for creative movements come not only from physical objects in the 3DTI room, but also from a remote dancer who is placed in geographically-remote 3DTI room and appears in a joint virtual space with our dancer. Suddenly the choreographer has exponentially more options to create new body movements in the new dance since the 3DTI technology offers an array of visual stimulations called Digital Options which will influence this movement making process. Random, nondeterministic behaviors found within this new dance making process will interact with the distributed 3DTI system initiating different functional and data configurations and compositions; a creative interactive feedback loop between the expressive art of making dances and the more dynamic capabilities of the Information Technology allows the unexpected, random, at least non-deterministic (if desired) behaviors as the distributed 3DTI system changes and works with different functional and data configurations and compositions.
* Joint work with Lisa Wymore (UC Berkeley), Klara Nahrstedt (UIUC) ,Renata Sheppard (UIUC), Olivier Kreylos (UC Davis)
Biography: Dr. Ruzena Bajcsy is Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the University of California Berkeley. From 2001 to 2004 she was Director of CITRIS at UC Berkeley. Prior to coming to Berkeley, she was Assistant Director of the Computer Information Science and Engineering Directorate (CISE) between December 1, 1998 and September 1, 2001. As head of National Science Foundation's CISE directorate, Dr. Bajcsy managed a $500 million annual budget. She came to the NSF from the University of Pennsylvania where she was a professor of computer science and engineering. Dr. Bajcsy was a member of President George W. Bush's Information Technology Advisory Committee (2003-2006). In this role, she co-authored the report entitled "Computational Science: Ensuring America's Competitiveness" which was submitted to President Bush on May 27, 2005. Dr. Bajcsy is a pioneering researcher in machine perception, robotics and artificial intelligence. She was Director of the University of Pennsylvania's General Robotics and Active Sensory Perception Laboratory, which she founded in 1979. Dr. Bajcsy is highly regarded, not only for her significant research contributions, but also for her leadership in the creation of a world-class robotics laboratory, recognized world wide as a premiere research center.
She is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, as well as the Institute of Medicine. Dr. Bajcsy received her master's and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering from Slovak Technical University in 1957 and 1967, respectively. She received a Ph.D. in computer science in 1972 from Stanford University, and since that time has been teaching and doing research at Penn's Department of Computer and Information Science. She began as an assistant professor and after 13 years became chair of the department. Prior to her work at the University of Pennsylvania, she taught during the 1950s and 1960s as an instructor and assistant professor in the Department of Mathematics and Department of Computer Science at Slovak Technical University in Bratislava. In 2001 she received an honorary doctorate from the University of Ljubljana in Slovenia. In 2001 she became a recipient of the ACM A. Newell award, and in 2005 she received the ACM Distinguished Service Award.
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