Ph.D XXXIX

Supervisor: Fabio Buttussi

Phone: +39 0432 558413

Room: Rizzi L2c-02-CD 

Mail: pascoli.massimiliano@spes.uniud.it

Research Project

Autonomous multi-agent simulation techniques in extended reality

In the last decade, credible and convincing crowd behavior simulation has become essential for many research areas such as those concerning videogames, social networks and metaverse, cinema CGI, urban planning, safety/riots/evacuation simulations, including military training, and cultural heritage.

The goal of this research is to design techniques to simulate realistic crowds of autonomous agents in an efficient and scalable way, with particular attention to immersive Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality applications. The research project focuses on increasing the variety and plausibility of agents relying on psychological metrics, appearance, individual behaviors, and cultural aspects. To achieve this goal, the research proposal will consider personality, emotions, and their influence on clothing and facial expressions, as well as other ways to express individuality. To this purpose, Generative Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning models, and Deep Learning are areas of particular interest since they supply excellent tools to help in these research endeavors.

The research will be validated with applications to serious games and training in various domains that will be evaluated through user testing.