Ken Perlin, a professor from the Computer Science Department at New York University, will be the featured speaker at a colloquium hosted by the UNM Computer Science Department. The colloquium will be held Tuesday, Oct. 26, in Woodward Hall, rm. 147. Perlin’s talk, “How will Hamlet find the Holodeck,” will get underway at 11 a.m.
Character driven narrative, which drives such media as theatre, novels and cinema, is one of the primary ways that a society collectively explores that great human obsession: the human condition says Perlin.
Computer-mediated interactive media can bring powerful new voices to this tradition, but only when two specific kinds of tools are sufficiently developed: a generation of contingent narratives that can shift interactively based on character, personality, psychological state, and kinship groups, and effective virtual actors that can convey subtle, dynamic and conflicting emotional states.
“I will lay out a roadmap for achieving those goals, and I will show work that we've already done toward achieving powerful and believable virtual actors,” said Perlin. “I will conclude with some thoughts about what a psychologically mature interactive narrative medium might be like, and why it will utterly change our culture.”
Among Perlin's many achievements, in addition to being the first and maybe only computer scientists with an Academy Award, is that he started the Center for Advanced Technology at NYU which was a state-funded initiative much like UNM’s new ARTS Lab.
Perlin is also the director of the Media Research Laboratory and the co-director of the NYU Center for Advanced Technology. His research interests include graphics, animation and multimedia. In Jan. 2004, he was the featured artist at the Whitney Museum of American Art. In 2002, he received the NYC Mayor's award for excellence in Science and Technology and the Sokol award for outstanding Science faculty at NYU.
In 1997 he won an Academy Award for Technical Achievement from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for his noise and turbulence procedural texturing techniques, which are widely used in feature films and television. In 1991 he received a Presidential Young Investigator Award from the National Science Foundation.
Perlin received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from New York University in 1986, and a B.A. in theoretical mathematics from Harvard University in 1979.
Contact: Steve Carr, (505) 277-1821
Posted by scarr at October 25, 2004 09:13 AM