This travel grant supports USA participants to the workshop on "Modeling, Simulation, and Visual Analysis of Large Crowds" in November 2011 at 13th International Conference on Computer Vision. This is a multi-disciplinary workshop that addresses challenges related to visual analysis and simulation of large crowds. The workshop engages complimentary viewpoints from different areas including computer vision, computer graphics, physics-based simulation, and evacuation dynamics to develop additional insight into crowd analysis, modeling and simulation problem. This grant partially supports the travel of invited speakers and participants, especially from computer graphics, simulation, and pedestrian dynamics. The final proceedings of the workshop along with speaker slides would be made available via WWW.
. This workshop was co-located with ICCV (international conference on Computer Vision) held in Barcelona, November 2011. The workshop was organized to present complimentary viewpoints from areas of computer vision, computer graphics, physics, and evacuation dynamics to develop additional insight into crowd analysis, modeling and simulation problem. Some of the issues to be examined in the workshop include the principles that characterize complex crowd behavior of heterogeneous individuals, mathematical models of crowd motion, and applicability of low level vision tasks to crowd analysis. The detailed program about this workshop is available at: http://vision.eecs.ucf.edu/ICCVWorkshop/home.html This was an inter-disciplinary workshop that included researchers working in crowd simulation in computer graphics, simulated environments, pedestrian dynamics, computer vision, and related areas. There were many exciting papers on new crowd motion models, extracting crowd trajectories from videos, application of crowd simulation to model the behavior at religious events, behavior modeling, etc. All these papers are available on the WWW site for general public. In particular, this was amongt the first few workshops that brough together researchers from varying areas (and background) working on various aspects of crowd simulation and behavior recognition and lead to many new collaborations and research directions. The workshop program (with papers) is available online on that WWW site. Furthermore, the PIs of this grant and workshop organizers have been working on a monograph that consists of research and survey papers from different authors and other leading researchers. It is expected that this workshop and the monograph has considerably advanced the state of the art in crowd simulation, modeling, recognition, and planning and would result in better tools for many broad applications (e.g. architecture design, crowd management in public or large-scaled events, improved training environments, as well as detection of abnormal crowd events). Furthermore, the workshop provided a good exposure and learning experience to graduate students and young researchers to interact with senior folks in the field.
