Bio

Dr. Karen Liu is an associate professor in the School of Interactive Computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology. She received her B.E. degree from the National Taiwan University in 1999, and her M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science from the University of Washington in 2001 and 2005 respectively. Before joining Georgia Tech, Liu was an assistant professor at the University of Southern California since 2006. Liu's research interests are in computer graphics and animation, including physics-based animation, character animation, numerical methods, robotics and computational biomechanics. The goal of her research is to expand computer-generated character animation from a visualization tool to an interdisciplinary research areas centered at the studies of human motion and autonomous control. Specifically, she will focus on three inter-related research directions: (1) Integrating insights of biomechanics to enhance physics-based computational models for synthesis of human motion. (2) Designing efficient algorithms for controlling and simulating optimal motion. (3) Synthesizing autonomous behaviors with synthetic sensory and physiology. Liu recently received National Science Foundation CAREER Award and was named 2007 Young Innovators Under 35 by Technology Review.