Prof. Yang is currently a Professor at the National Centre for Computer Animation, Bournemouth University. He has over 30 years’ experience of research, education and professional practice in computer animation, motion capture and synthesis, data mining, digital health, virtual reality and surgery simulation. He is passionate to promote the technical innovation of AI in animation production and has successfully developed new technique into animation production pipeline. He has produced more than 90 peer reviewed publications that include international journal articles, conference papers, and book chapters. His work on muscle modeling and deformation has aroused lots of attentions and has been widely reported by New Scientist, Wiedza I Zycie and MIT Technic Review etc. As PI and Co-I, he has secured over 20 research grants from European Commission, British Academy, Leverhulme, British Council, Newton Fund, Innovate UK, Wessex AHSN, Higher Education Innovation Fund, Royal Bournemouth Hospital. Prof. Yang’s excellent performance and contribution has helped NCCA to win the Queen’s Anniversary Award in 2011 for its contribution in computer animation education. Prof. Yang has supervised over 30 PhD students, postdocs, research assistant and international visiting scholars. Prof. Yang has rich experience to manage teams with both artist and technician together, and collaborate closely with companies, like Disney Research, Double negative, MPC. He has been appointed as chair and examiner for PhD viva for several times, including External PhD Examiner for Imperial College London, The University of Edinburgh, Durham University, University of Sheffield, University of Bath, Cardiff University, University of Calgary (Canada), University of Northumbria, Brunel University London and University of Bedfordshire. He is a member of the Peer Review College of the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) UK and the Computer Science Evaluation Group of the Natural Science and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC). Prof. Yang is a member of the Program Committee for several international conferences (SIGGRAPH Asia, CGI, CASA etc), conference chairs (CGI2012, CASA2020), journal reviewer for many top journals (TVCG, ACM ToG, C&G, Signal Processing, Pattern Recognition, Neurocomputing, IEEE Access) and conferences (SIGGRAPH, Eurographics, PG, CGI etc). He has given several invited talks and keynote presentations internationally.

Research

Prof. Yang's research focuses on a number of topics relating to character animation, geometrical modeling, volume rendering, physically-based deformation, motion capture and synthesis, cloth simulation, virtual reality, surgery simulation, computer aided design. Since he joined NCCA in 2003, he is mainly responsible for the AHRC project “Fast Animator Controlled Synthetic Creature Skin Deformations” and GWR project “Retargeting Animated Human Characters”. His work on muscle modeling and deformation has aroused lots of attentions and has been widely reported by New Scientist, Wiedza I Zycie and MIT Technic Review etc. He has produced more than 60 peer reviewed publications that include international journal articles, conference papers, and book chapters.

Publications

Grants

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