Eakta Jain

A picture of Eakta.

I am a sixth year graduate student at the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. I work in the Graphics Lab and am advised by Jessica Hodgins and Yaser Sheikh. Before starting graduate school, I graduated with a Bachelor of Technology in Electrical Engineering in 2006 from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur (IITK).

I am interested in the intersection of artist-created visual content with computer-driven technologies. My recent research examines how we could combine the strengths of 3D computer animation with the strengths of hand-drawn animation.

For example, the traditional medium of pencil and paper is intuitive to hand-animators in a way that menus, sliders and pointers are not. Can we allow hand animators to create their animation on pencil and paper and then transfer the style of this animation to a 3D animation? (SCA 2009)

A strength of 3D computer animation is the physical simulation of a variety of dynamic effects. Can we augment hand-drawn animation with physically simulated secondary motion? (SCA 2010, Best Paper Award)

In my free time, I am learning to swim the butterfly stroke, and like reading science-fiction.

Thesis oral: April 24th, 2012, 3:30 pm

"Title: Attention-guided Algorithms to Retarget and Augment Animations, Stills and Videos"

Publications:

  1. Three-dimensional Proxies for Hand-drawn Characters, ACM Transactions on Graphics, 2012, project page.
  2. Augmenting Hand Animation with Three-dimensional Secondary Motion'', Proceedings of the Symposium on Computer Animation (SCA), 2010, Best Paper Award, project page
  3. Leveraging the Talent of Hand Animators to Create Three-Dimensional Animation, Proceedings of the Symposium on Computer Animation (SCA), 2009, project page
  4. Hypergraphs- Organizing complex natural neural networks, Proceedings of the Third International Conference on Intelligent Sensing and Information Processing, 2005
  5. Dancing Puppets- An Innovative Approach to Learning Programming" Proceedings of the International Conference on Engineering Education, University of Florida, 2004

CV:

pdf format

Pictures:

Notes to self:

updated May 2012.
Contact: ejain at cs dot cmu dot edu.