Zhigang Deng

Assistant Professor
Computer Science Department
University of Houston

Office:
Phillip G. Hoffman Hall (PGH), 536
Houston, TX 77204-3010

Tel: +1 713 743 1018
Fax: +1 713 743 3335

Email (preferred way to contact me):
zdeng4 (at) uh.edu |
zdeng (at) cs.uh.edu

Mailing Address:
University of Houston Department of Computer Science 501 Philip G. Hoffman Hall, Houston, TX, 77204-3010

Teaching

Fall 2011
CS6372 3D Computer Graphics

Fall 2011
CS6358 Introduction to Game Development

Spring 2011
CS6356 Computer Animation and Simulation

Spring 2011
CS6397 Advanced Game Development

Travel

April 14-15, 2010 UCSB, CA
June 1-24, 2010 China
July 24-29, 2010 SIGGRAPH 2010, Los Angeles
Aug 10-12, 2010 Arlington, VA
Oct 2-4, 2010 Gainesville, FL
Nov 24-28, 2010 Frankfurt, Germany
Dec 6-7, 2010 Irvine, CA
April 3-7, 2011 San Jose, CA
May 4-6, 2011 Portland, OR
May 7-12, 2011 CHI 2011, Vancouver, Canada
August 29 - Sep 2, 2011 Alberta, Canada

Acknowledgments

This page is built upon the neat CSS and layout created by Prof. Jeffrey Heer at Stanford University.

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selected current projects

FacePEM: Perceptually Guided Facial Animation

perceptually guided computational framework for expressive facial animation generation and evaluation

Eye and Head Animations

data-driven synthesis algorithms for realistic and coordinated eye and head movements

Visual Speech Animation Synthesis

generate expressive visual speech animations based on novel typed or spoken input

Facial Animation Editing and Transferring

efficient and automated algorithms and systems for editing and transferring facial motions across different models or modalities

Blendshape Animation

algorithms for automating or reducing time-consuming tuning efforts of the blendshape animation approach that has been widely used in industry practice

Character Motion Compression and Retrieval

effective algorithms for compressing and retrieving character motions by hierarchically extracting meaningful motion patterns from dataset

Improving Gaming Experience by Incorporating Physiological Feedback or Gamers' Profiles

novel methodology to improve users' gaming experience by monitoring their physiological signals or their individualized gamer profile, and thus automatically adjusting the difficulty level of computer games

Freestyle Group Formation Generation for Agent-based Crowd Simulation

an intuitive yet efficient approach to generate arbitrary and precise group formations by sketching formation boundaries


Latest News
Our paper "Visual and Force-Feedback Guidance for Robot-Assisted Interventions in the Beating Heart with Real-Time MRI" has been selected as a Finalist of "Best Medical Robotics Paper Award" on IEEE ICRA 2012.
Recent journal paper acceptance: 2 papers to IEEE TVCG, 1 paper to ACM TOMCCAP, 1 paper to IEEE CG&A, and 1 paper to IEEE TIP.
I am invited to participate in and give a talk on the Banff International 2011 Workshop on "Geometry for Anatomy" from August 29th to September 2nd, 2011.
Two papers are accepted to International Conference on Medical Image Computing and Computer Assisted Intervention (MICCAI ) 2011.
Student teams from our UH gaming class dominated the US Microsoft Imagine Cup Game Design Competition 2011 by winning the 1st and 2nd places in the Mobile game category and the 3rd place in the PC/Xbox game category! [more]
I win a Nokia Open Innovation Research Award to work on a novel gesture interface based mixed reality game on mobile platforms, in collaboration with the Nokia Research Center at Palo Alto.
Paper "Perceptual Analysis of Talking Avatar Head Movements: A Quantitative Perspective" has been accepted to CHI 2011 conference.
I win a Google Faculty Research Award to work on the development of a novel avatar interface for mobile computing.
biography

I am an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at University of Houston (UH), the Founding Director of the UH Computer Graphics and Interactive Media (CGIM) Lab, and the Founding Co-Director of the UH Interactive Game Education and Research (IGER) Lab. My research interests are in the broad areas of computer graphics, computer animation, human computer interaction, and visual-haptic interfacing for biomedical computing.

I completed my Ph.D. in Computer Science at the Integrated Media System Center (NSF ERC) and Department of Computer Science at the University of Southern California. I also received my B.S. degree in Mathematics from Xiamen University (China), and my M.S. in Computer Science from Peking University (China). Over the years, I've worked at the Founder Research and Development Center (China) and AT&T Shannon Research Lab.

Currently, I am advising or co-advising the following PhD students: Xiaohan Ma, Nikhil Navkar, Binh H. Le, Mario Rincon, and Xifeng Gao. My current research has been funded by the National Science Foundation, the Texas Norman Hackerman Advanced Research Program, Google, Nokia, the Methodist Hospital Research Institute, and other industrial sources.