Prof. Dinesh K Pai

University of British Columbia, Canada

Dinesh K. Pai is a Professor and Tier 1 Canada Research Chair in the Department of Computer Science at the University of British Columbia. He is also the Founder and CEO of a startup, Vital Mechanics Research, Inc. His highly interdisciplinary research is focused on developing computational models of human movement. He has received many prestigious awards and grants, including UBC's Killam Research Prize, two NSERC Discovery Accelerator Awards, and an international Human Frontier Science Program grant. Pai has been a Professor at Rutgers University; has held visiting professorships at Carnegie Mellon University's Robotics Institute, New York University's Center for Neural Science, the University of Siena (as Santa Chiara Chair in Cognitive Science), and the Collège de France, Paris (elected Professeur Invité); and a Fellowship of the BC Advanced Systems Institute. He received his Ph.D. from Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, and his B.Tech. degree from the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras. See http://sensorimotor.cs.ubc.ca/pai/ for more information.

Title: Digital Humans: Science and Simulation

My goal is to develop realistic computational models of the human body: how we move and how our bodies interact with products such as clothing. Despite a long history of research, current models have many surprising shortcomings. I will describe some fundamental problems with previous models of the complex human biomechanical system, and show how we can model it better. I will present examples of my work on modeling human hands, eyes, and skin. Finally, I will describe a recent breakthrough in building personalized models an individual's body. We have developed a complete pipeline for measurement, modeling, parameter estimation, and data-driven simulation using the finite element method. Our methods can be used to create personalized digital avatars of individuals or of a population. There are many potential applications, ranging from virtual prototyping for product design to virtual garment try-on for e-commerce.