Connelly Barnes will present his research seminar/general exam on Tuesday May 6 at 3PM in Room 402. The members of his committee are: Adam Finkelstein (advisor), Szymon Rusinkiewicz, and Perry Cook. Everyone is invited to attend his talk and those faculty wishing to remain for the oral exam following are welcome to do so. His abstract and reading list follow below. Abstract: We present a video-based interface that allows users of all skill levels to quickly create cutout-style animations by performing the character motions. The puppeteer first creates a cast of physical puppets using paper, markers and scissors. He then physically moves these puppets to tell a story. Using an inexpensive overhead camera our system tracks the motions of the puppets and renders them on a new background while removing the puppeteer's hands. Our system runs in real-time (at 30 fps) so that the puppeteer and the audience can immediately see the animation that is created. Moreover, our system supports a variety of constraints and effects including articulated characters, multi-track animation, scene changes, camera controls, 2.5D environments, shadows, and animations cycles. We demonstrate that even first-time users, including an eleven-year-old, can use our system to quickly turn a story idea into an animation. Reading list, books: Trucco and Verri, Introductory Techniques for 3-D Computer Vision Reading list, papers: Igarashi, T, Moscovich, T, Hughes, J. 2005. As-rigid-as-possible shape manipulation. ACM Trans. Graph. (Proc. SIGGRAPH), 1134-1141. Lowe, D. 1999. Object recognition from local scale-invariant features. International Conference on Computer Vision, 1150-1157. Thorne, M, Burke, D, Van de Panne, M. 2004. Motion doodles: an interface for sketching character motion. SIGGRAPH '04: ACM SIGGRAPH 2004 Papers, ACM Press, New York, NY, USA, 424-431. Tomasi, C, Kanade, T. 1991. Detection and tracking of point features. Technical Report CMU-CS-91-132, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, USA. David, J, Agrawala, M, Chuang, E, Popovic, Z, Salesin, D. 2003. A sketching interface for articulated figure animation. Proc. 2003 ACM SIGGRAPH/Eurographics symposium on Computer animation, Aire-la-Ville, Switzerland, 320-328. Dontcheva, M, Yngve, G, Popovic, Z. 2003. Layered acting for character animation. ACM SIGGRAPH 2003 Papers, ACM Press, New York, NY, USA, 409-416. Winnemoller, H, Olsen, S, Gooch, B. 2006. Realtime video abstraction. ACM Transactions on Graphics (TOG) 25, 3, 1221-1226. Agarwala, A, Hertzmann, A, Salesin, D, Seitz, S. 2004. Keyframe-based tracking for rotoscoping and animation. SIGGRAPH '04: ACM SIGGRAPH 2004 Papers, ACM Press, New York, NY, USA, 584-591. Ishii, H, Ullmer, B. 1997. Tangible bits: towards seamless interfaces between people, bits and atoms. Proc. SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems, 234-241. Knep, B, Hayes, C, Sayre, R, Williams, T. 1995. Dinosaur input device. Proc. SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems, 304-309.