Brandon Haworth is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science, Faculty of Engineering & Computer Science at the University of Victoria. He is the Director of the Graphics, Artificial Intelligence, Design, & Games (GAIDG) Lab and a Research Fellow at the Institute on Aging and Lifelong Health at the University of Victoria. Brandon received the B.Sc. degree in Computer Science from York University in 2013, M.Sc. in 2016, and Ph.D. in 2019, and was a Post-Doctoral Fellow with the Ontario Research Fund/Intelligent Systems for Sustainable Urban Mobility (ORF/ISSUM) project in 2019/2020. His past research concerned the development and gamification of interactive motor speech rehabilitation for people with neurodegenerative diseases. Brandon works within the broad areas of Graphics, Simulation, Artificial Intelligence, and Human-Computer Interaction. His primary research focuses are diversity in crowd simulations, locomotion & biomechanical modelling in human steering, multi-agent reinforcement learning, and human-centric artificial intelligence in simulation and design. The applications of this research cut across several fields, including gaming, rehabilitation, architecture, urban planning, predictive design, safety analysis, inclusive media, assistive technology and more. He is a Member of the ACM and the IEEE and is an Associate Editor of the Computer Animation and Virtual Worlds journal.
Academic Interests
- Computer Graphics
- Crowd Simulation
- Deep/Multi-agent Reinforcement Learning
- Human-Centred Artificial Intelligence & Augmented Intelligence
- Agent-based Modelling
- Game Design and Development
- Human-Computer Interaction
- Virtual Reality
- Architectural Design and Optimization
- Assistive and Healthcare Technologies
- Behavioural Sciences
- Rehabilitation Sciences
Research Lab
The GAIDG Lab explores difficult problems in the representation, visibility, and decision-making of digital agents and humans. We create and innovate in human behaviour & movement modelling, human-centred artificial intelligence, game design, game AI, architectural optimization, augmented intelligence in complex design, assistive technologies, rehabilitative technologies, and more.
Professional Associations
- Member ACM
- Member ACM Special Interest Group on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques (ACM SIGGRAPH)
- Member ACM Special Interest Group on Artificial Intelligence (ACM SIGAI)
- Member ACM Committee on Women
- Member IEEE
- Member Canadian Human-Computer Communications Society, CHCCS/SCDHM Special Interest Group within the Canadian Information Processing Society (CIPS)
Latest News
- August 2023: I designed and taught a highschool level course in game development with ScienceVenture @ UVic.
- May 2, 2023: Paper accepted at GI ’23: Graphics Interface 2023, Saliency Driven Gaze Control for Autonomous Pedestrians
- March 20, 2023: Paper published in the journal Computer Graphics Forum, Cognitive Model of Agent Exploration with Vision and Signage Understanding. Journal publication of work from 21st ACM SIGGRAPH / EUROGRAPHICS Symposium on Computer Animation (SCA 2022).
- September 14, 2022: Recipient of the 2022 W.E. Cowie Faculty Innovation Award
- August 10, 2022: Paper accepted at SAP ’22: ACM Symposium on Applied Perception, Impact of Manikin Display on Perception of Spatial Planning
- July 27, 2022: Paper accepted at the 21st ACM SIGGRAPH / EUROGRAPHICS Symposium on Computer Animation (SCA 2022), Cognitive Model of Agent Exploration with Vision and Signage Understanding
- March 27, 2022: Paper accepted at Computers & Graphics, Automatic estimation of parametric saliency maps (PSMs) for autonomous pedestrians
- December 22, 2021: Paper accepted at IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, Heterogeneous Crowd Simulation using Parametric Reinforcement Learning
- September 24, 2021: Paper accepted at the IEEE AIVR workshop Modeling and Animating Realistic Crowds and Humans (MARCH 2021), Representative Synthetic Crowds for Inclusive Environment Design
- September 7, 2021: Paper accepted at the 14th ACM SIGGRAPH Conference on Motion, Interaction and Games (MIG 2021), PSM: Parametric Saliency Maps for Autonomous Pedestrians.
- September 6, 2021: Paper accepted at the 16th International Symposium on Visual Computing (ISVC 2021), DeepSolfège: Recognizing Solfège Hand Signs using Convolutional Neural Networks.
- July 1, 2021: Paper accepted at the ICML workshop Unsupervised Reinforcement Learning, MASAI: Multi-agent Summative Assessment Improvement for Unsupervised Environment Design
- June 15, 2021: NSERC Discovery Grant funded, my research program Diverse Synthetic Crowds in Media, Design, and Analysis will be supported over the next five years
- January 7, 2021: Invited talk at the IJCAI workshop Neuro-Cognitive Modeling of Humans and Environments, Learning to Move – Reinforcement Learning in Navigation
- September 23, 2020: Two papers accepted at 13th ACM SIGGRAPH Conference on Motion, Interaction and Games (MIG 2020), (1) Deep Integration of Physical Humanoid Control and Crowd Navigation (2) Watch Out! Modelling Pedestrians with Egocentric Distractions
- August 25, 2020: Paper accepted for a Regular Issue in The Visual Computer journal, Modeling Distracted Agents in Crowd Simulations.
- July 23, 2020: Paper accepted for a Special Issue in Computer Animation and Virtual Worlds journal, Democratizing the Simulation
of Human-Building Interactions. - July 1, 2020: I join the Department of Computer Science, Faculty of Engineering at the University of Victoria as an Assistant Professor.
- April 29, 2020: Paper accepted at Computer Graphics International 2020, Modeling Distracted Agents In Crowd Simulations
- March 3, 2020: Paper accepted at SimAUD 2020, SimService: A Cross-browser Cloud-based Crowd Analytics Platform for Architectural Design Analysis
- February 28, 2020: Two papers accepted at the CHI2020 HabiTech Workshop, (1) Representative Synthetic Crowds for Inclusive Environment Design (2) Simulation-as-a-Service: A Cross-Platform Framework for Analyzing Human-Building Interactions
- February 27, 2020: I join the excellent Editorial Board of Computer Animation and Virtual Worlds Journal as Associate Editor
- November 11, 2019: Paper accepted at IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications, Gamification of Crowd-Driven Environment Design
- October 1, 2019: Paper accepted at NeurIPS 2019 Deep Reinforcement Learning Workshop, Multi-Agent Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning for Humanoid Navigation
- August 15, 2019: Paper accepted at IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, Interactive Architectural Design with Diverse Solution Exploration
Contact
Department of Computer Science
Office 568, Engineering and Computer Science (ECS) building
University of Victoria Victoria, BC
bhaworth@uvic.ca
+1 250-472-5772