Professor Carol O’Sullivan Elected as Fellow of Eurographics

Posted on: 19 October 2007

Professor Carol O’Sullivan, Professor of Computer Science and Dean of Graduate Studies in Trinity College has been elected as fellow to the European Association for Computer Graphics (Eurographics), in recognition of her contributions to the computer graphics research community. She is the first Irish fellow to be elected to the association.

In being elected to fellowship, Professor O’Sullivan’s research in computer graphics including perception, virtual humans, crowds, and physically-based animation was particularly noted.  She has published over 90 peer-reviewed papers in this field of research.

In addition to her research on the animation and perception of collisions and other dynamic events, in recent years Professor O’Sullivan has been particularly interested in the simulation and perception of virtual humans and crowds. She led the development of Virtual Dublin – a highly detailed model of Dublin ‘s city centre, inhabited by crowds of pedestrians, and used it as a platform for perceptual experiments to determine the factors needed to produce realistic renderings and animations of crowds of humans and urban environments. This work has formed the basis for the recently funded Metropolis project –  a novel interdisciplinary project involving computer graphics, engineering and cognitive neuroscience research. Professor O’Sullivan is one of four  principal  investigators on this €2.5m project, funded by Science Foundation Ireland , where the aim is to apply principles of human multisensory perception to create a lifelike depiction of a virtual urban environment with street scenes, crowds and traffic noise.

Professor O’Sullivan is head of the Graphics Vision and Visualisation group (GV2) at the School of Computer Science and Statistics. GV2 is an internationally active group dedicated to carrying out cutting edge research in computer graphics, computer vision and all aspects of visual computing.  GV2 will host  the international Symposium on Computer Animation (SCA), a leading forum for the dissemination of cutting-edge research in computer animation, next July.