Cheng-Yun Karen Liu
| Cheng-Yun Karen Liu | |
|---|---|
| Born | 1977 (age 48–49) |
| 🏳️ Nationality | Taiwanese |
| 🎓 Alma mater | National Taiwan University (B.S.) University of Washington (Ph.D) |
| 💼 Occupation | |
| Known for | Interactive Computing Computer Graphics and Robotics |
| 🏅 Awards | CAREER Award, National Science Foundation (2007), Young Innovators Under 35, MIT Technology Review (2007), SIGGRAPH Significant New Research Award, ACM (2012), Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship, Alfred P. Sloan Foundation (2010) |
Cheng-Yun Karen Liu (born 1977) is a Taiwanese computer scientist. She is an associate professor in the Computer Science Department at Stanford University and the director of The Movement Lab.
Early life and education
Liu was born in Taiwan in 1977 and raised in Hsin-Chu, Taiwan. She grew up on the campus of National Tsing Hua University, Taiwan. In 1996, she graduated from National Experimental High School in Taiwan. She studied Computer Science and Information Engineering at National Taiwan University and graduated in 1999. She obtained her Master's Degree in Computer Science and Engineering in 2002 and her Ph.D in Computer Science and Engineering in 2005 from University of Washington.
Career
From January 2006 to May 2007, Liu was an assistant professor in the Viterbi School of Engineering at University of Southern California. Later, in May 2007, she joined GVU Center at Georgia Tech at Georgia Institute of Technology. She founded a startup company called Activate3D, which uses the technology Intelligent Character Interface (ICM), where she also worked as the chief scientist. Later she attained an associate professorship at Georgia Institute of Technology from 2012 to 2019. In June 2019, she began working at Stanford University as an associate professor.
She is a member of ACM and IEEE. She served on the ACM SIGGRAPH Program Committee between 2010 and 2018 and was the program chair at ACM SIGGRAPH Asia 2019.
Research
Liu's research interests are in computer graphics and robotics, including physics-based animation, character animation, optimal control, reinforcement learning, and computational biomechanics. She developed computational approaches to modeling realistic and natural human movements, learning complex control policies for humanoids and assistive robots, and advancing fundamental numerical simulation and optimal control algorithms. The algorithms and software developed in her lab have fostered interdisciplinary collaboration with researchers in robotics, computer graphics, mechanical engineering, biomechanics, neuroscience, and biology.
Her research was featured in MIT Technology Review, where she was on the Innovators Under 35 list in 2007: she worked on natural 'human-like' movements of animated characters by minimizing the energy in short segments of motion.[1]
Later, in 2012, she was awarded a Significant New Researcher Award by ACM SIGGRAPH, for her work beginning with her first ACM SIGGRAPH paper in 2002, “Synthesis of Complex Dynamics Character Motion from Simple Animation”[2]. Her work is marked by a principled and biomechanically sound approach to modeling the human form. This scientific grounding for her optimizations causes her results to naturally represent such characteristics of lifelike behavior as appropriate forces and energy efficient strategies. Her work is rich with compelling examples that span much of human behavior and include a small child pulling on the hand of a parent as they walk together (“Composition of Complex Optimal Multi-Character Motions” [3]), human grasps that include the soft contacts of the figures (“Dextrous Manipulation from a Grasping Pose”[4] and “Controlling Physics-Based Characters Using Soft Contacts”[5] ), and the elastic elements in shoes, tendons and ligaments that enable natural gait patterns on rough terrain (“Learning Physics-Based Motion Style with Nonlinear Inverse Optimization”[6] ). Her recent research has expanded on the theme of optimization to create motion and control for creatures swimming through water (“Articulated Swimming Creatures” [7]). [8]
Teaching
She has taught the following courses at Georgia Institute of Technology:
- CS 4496/7496 Computer Animation and Simulation
- CS 8003 Numerical Optimization and Applications
- CS 3451 Computer Graphics
She is currently teaching CS 348E Character Animation: Modeling, Simulation, and Control of Human Motion [9] at Stanford University.
Honors and Awards
- Samsung GRO Program Award, 2018
- Google Faculty Award, 2017
- Samsung GRO Program Award, 2017
- Grand Prize of 10th World Open Source Software, 2016
- Certificate from Thank A Teacher Program, 2013
- ACM SIGGRAPH Significant New Research Award, 2012
- Class of 1934 Course Survey Teaching Effectiveness Awards, 2012
- Georgia Tech Sigma Xi Young Faculty Award, 2011
- Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship, 2010
- Junior Faculty Research Award, College of Computing, Georgia Tech 2010
- NSF Career Award, 2007.
- Technology Review: Young Innovators under 35, 2007.
- NVIDIA Fellowship, 2003.
References
- ↑ http://www2.technologyreview.com/tr35/profile.aspx?TRID=616
- ↑ Liu, Popovic, Karen, Zoran (2002). "Synthesis of Complex Dynamics Character Motion from Simple Animation". ACM Transactions on Graphics. 21 (3): 408–416. doi:10.1145/566654.566596.
- ↑ Liu, Hertzmann, Popovic (2006). "Composition of Complex Optimal Multi-Character Motions". ACM SIGGRAPH/Eurographics Symposium on Computer Animation.CS1 maint: Multiple names: authors list (link)
- ↑ Liu, Karen (2009). "Dextrous Manipulation from a Grasping Pose". ACM Transactions on Graphics. 28 (3): 1–6. doi:10.1145/1531326.1531365.
- ↑ Jain, Liu, Sumit, Karen (2011). "Controlling Physics-Based Characters Using Soft Contacts". ACM Transactions on Graphics. 30 (6): 1–10. doi:10.1145/2070781.2024197.
- ↑ Liu, Hertzmann, Popovic, Karen, Aaron, Zoran (2005). "Learning Physics-Based Motion Style with Nonlinear Inverse Optimization". ACM Transactions on Graphics. 24 (3): 1071–1081. doi:10.1145/1073204.1073314.CS1 maint: Multiple names: authors list (link)
- ↑ Tan, Gu, Turk, Liu, Jie, Yuting, Greg, Karen (2011). "Articulated Swimming Creatures". ACM Transactions on Graphics. 30 (4): 1. doi:10.1145/2010324.1964953.CS1 maint: Multiple names: authors list (link)
- ↑ https://www.siggraph.org/about/awards/2012-new-researcher-award/
- ↑ https://explorecourses.stanford.edu/search?view=catalog&filter-coursestatus-Active=on&q=CS%20348E:%20Character%20Animation:%20Modeling,%20Simulation,%20and%20Control%20of%20Human%20Motion&academicYear=20192020
External links
SIGGRAPH Asia 2019 Trailer, featuring Karen Liu playing piano in the background
This article "Karen Liu" is from Wikipedia. The list of its authors can be seen in its historical and/or the page Edithistory:Karen Liu. Articles copied from Draft Namespace on Wikipedia could be seen on the Draft Namespace of Wikipedia and not main one.

