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July 2006
Professor Elizabeth Bradley
was one of 50 scholars nationwide to be named a 2006-2007
Fellow of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study
at Harvard University. Founded at Radcliffe College in 1960, Radcliffe
Institute fellowships are designed to support scholars, scientists, artists,
and writers of exceptional promise and demonstrated accomplishments who wish to
pursue work in academic and professional fields and in the creative arts.
Since 1960 more than 1300 scholars, scientists, artists, writers, and musicians have been named fellows.
A common task in dance, martial arts, animation, and many other movement genres
is for the character to move in an innovative and yet "stylistically consonant"
fashion. A corpus-based method that automates this process has been developed.
These algorithms use the mathematics of chaos to achieve innovation and simple
machine-learning techniques to enforce stylistic consonance. The goal of the
proposed project is to refine those algorithms, apply them to newer, richer
corpora, and extend them to different kinds of data. Flight simulators, for
instance, train pilots to respond to sequences of events that are
characteristic of different airplane failure modes. These sequences are
administered to a trainee by a human expert, which is costly and prone to bias
and other selection effects. The approach outlined above could be a useful way
to automate that process.
Bradley will work on this chaotic choreography project, titled
Computers, Chaos, and Choreography, with two colleagues --
David Capps, a dancer at Hunter College in New York,
and Jessica Hodgins, a computer scientist from Carnegie
Mellon University who does motion capture.
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