Funda Durupinar BABUR

About Me

I am an associate professor in the Department of Computer Science at UMass Boston.  My research links computer graphics, animation and psychology with a focus on creating believable virtual humans. 

I received my B.S. from Middle East Technical University and my M.S. and Ph.D degrees from  the Department of Computer Engineering at Bilkent University. After completing my Ph.D, I worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the Center for Human Modeling and Simulation, University of Pennsylvania.

News

• Our paper, "Effects of Embodiment and Personality in LLM-Based Conversational Agents" has been accepted to the IEEE VR 2025 conference.  A preprint version can be found at: https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.10993.

• I will serve as a Program Chair for the ACM Symposium on Applied Perception  (SAP 2025) to be held in Vancouver in August 2025.

• Our paper "An Iterative Approach to Build a Semantic Dataset for Facial Expression of Personality" has been accepted to the ACM SIGGRAPH Motion, Interaction, and Games conference.  Check it out: https://umbvrlab.github.io/perfex/.

• Check out our chapter "Emotional Expression as a Means of Communicating Virtual Human Personalities" in  Modeling Visual Aesthetics, Emotion, and Artistic Style. 

• The MASSXR Workshop will take place in Orlando on March 17th. We have two papers "Using LLMs to Animate Interactive Story Characters with Emotions and Personality" and "Towards Understanding Personality Expression via Body Motion".

• I have joined the editorial board of ACM Transactions on Applied Perception. 

• We are calling for original research papers to be presented at our 2nd Annual MASSXR Workshop on "Multi-modal Affective and Social Behavior Analysis and Synthesis in Extended Reality"  at IEEEVR 2024.  The workshop will be in Orlando on March 16-17. Submission deadline is January 10.  You can find more information on the MASSXR website.  

• We are organizing the 17th Annual ACM SIGGRAPH Conference on Motion, Interaction, and Games (MIG 2024) on Nov 21-23, 2024 in Arlington, VA. Details will be announced at https://sgmig.hosting.acm.org/.

• I will serve on the International Program Committee of MIG 2023.

• Check out BostonGFX, our program with Daniel Haehn to extend computer graphics education to learners of all levels. 

• We are organizing ACM Symposium on Applied Perception (SAP) 2023, co-located with SIGGRAPH, on August 5-6 in Los Angeles. Paper deadline is April 21st. 

• I will serve on the International Program Committee of SCA 2023.

• We are calling for original research papers to be presented at our MASSXR Workshop on "Multi-modal Affective and Social Behavior Analysis and Synthesis in Extended Reality"  at IEEEVR 2023. Submission is open till January 11.  You can find more information on the MASSXR website.  

• I will serve on the International Program Committees of SCA 2022 and SAP2022.

• Click to view my talk for the IEEE-MARCH workshop at AIVR 2021. 

• We call for original research or position papers for the IEEE-MARCH workshop at AIVR 2021. We welcome submissions on modeling digital humans, animating them, and creating crowds/groups of autonomous humans. The submission deadline is extended to 3 September 2021. You can find more information on the workshop website. 

• We call for original research papers and reviews on "Simulating Virtual Humans and Crowds" to be published in Frontiers in Virtual Reality. Abstract deadline is 25 October 2021. Full papers are due 14 February 2022. Please check the website for details and submission instructions. 

• Our paper "A Conversational Agent Framework with Multi-modal Personality Expression" is published in ACM Transactions on Graphics.  You can access it at https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3439795 or download the accepted version at [pdf]. We will present it at SIGGRAPH'21.

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