Two CS Students Receive Double Awards for their BS Project at an International Conference

The BS project of Bjarni Thor Árnason and Aegir Thorsteinsson, performed under the supervision of Hannes Vilhjálmsson at the HR CADIA lab in the spring, received two awards at the annual Intelligent Virtual Agents conference in Tokyo this September.  The project, "CADIA BML Realizer", done in collaboration with University of Southern California, is an open toolkit for displaying and animating virtual people in 3D virtual environments.  This is the first completely open and accessible real-time animation toolkit that takes a behavior description in BML as input ("Behavior Markup Language"), which is a new international standard for describing the precise coordination of body movement.

The project was submitted into a special competition for student projects in association with the main conference and it ended up sharing the first jury award price with one other project, but also received the public award as result of public voting.  The jury commented that Bjarni and Aegir's work contributed to improved collaboration between international research groups in the field of virtual agents since standardized and accessible tools have been scarce so far.

It is also worth noting that two master's students at CADIA also gave talks at the conference, and one of them, Gudny Ragna Jónsdóttir, got her paper nominated as "Best Student Paper

Ánægjulegt er að geta þess að á ráðstefnunni fluttu að auki tveir meistaranemar Gervigreindarsetursins fræðierindi, og var grein annars þeirra, Guðnýjar Rögnu Jónsdóttur, tilnefnd til verðlauna sem besta fræðigrein nemanda