ZF

Zahra Forootaninia

I am a PhD student at Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Minnesota.I am currently member of graphics group working on crowd simulation under supervision of Prof. Rahul Narain . I also got Masters in Astrophysics from Department of Physics and Astronomy at University of Minnesota in February 2015 before I switched to Computer Science. My current research lies on simulating the motion of multiple intelligent agents interacting with each other based on physics-based animation techniques.

Smoke Guiding




Art-directing smoke for special effects purposes is challenging. Scaling up the resolution can result in unpredictable changes in the behavior of the final animation due to the chaotic motion of fluid. We propose a simple and efficient method for guiding an Eulerian smoke simulation to match the behavior of a specified velocity field, such as a low-resolution animation of the same scene, while preserving the rich, turbulent details arising in the simulated fluid. Our method works by simply combining the high-frequency component of the simulated fluid velocity with the low-frequency component of the input guiding field. Link to the Paper.

Crowd Simulation




Whethere it's an animated characters walking throw a virtual world or automated cars driving throw crowds, collision avoidance plays an important role in multi-agent navigation and planning. Currently I am working on collision avoidance within the context of time-to-collisionbased navigation of multiple agents under supervision of Porf.Narain and collabration of Prof.Karamouzas at University of Minnesota. Link to the Paper.

SPH : Accretion Disk




I applied the Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH) solver with magnetic field added to the background to 10,000 particles which are orbiting a massive object with 10 times mass of the sun.
Since particles in the fluid has electric charge, they feel the magnetic force,and start to move in perpendicular direction to the magnetic field (based on Right-hand rule). Therefore, we expect to see the fluid flows in a specific direction which produce a jet.

Quaternions: Walking Skeleton


I applied quaternion implementation in order to move and rotate the bones of walking Skeleton.
Quaternions became so popular in many areas in computer animation. Quaternions can describe objects orientation in a very simple mathematical notation in three dimensions. They can make stable and smooth results. In addition we can avoid the gimbal lock can happen during the rotation using Euler angles.

Computer Vision works :




Edge detection : Applied Sobel and Robert operators to detect edges along with thresholding and thinning process.

Line and ellipse detection: I applied the Hough transform to find lines and ellipses.

Region detection: I used the method from “Optimizing two-pass connected-component labeling algorithms' paper by Kesheng Wu , Ekow Otoo and Kenji Suzuki' to extract connected regions and then I did blob statistics.

The Radio Luminosity Function and Galaxy Evolution of Abell 2256


For my master thesis in Astrophysics I worked on the Galaxy evolutions in the large scale structures. There are many observations in radio wavelength that shows diffuse and large emissions in the galaxy clusters called radio halo and relic. The origin of these emissions are still unknown but scientist believe that they probably created during mergings of galaxy clusters.
In my theses I looked at the cluster Abell 2256 that know as merging cluster and has a big radio halo. In my work I studied the effect of this merging subclusters on each galaxy in the cluster. I found very interesting results.

Find the link to my full thesis here