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Professor Carol O'Sullivan

Professor of Visual Computing (2010) (Computer Science)
Non College Properties
      
Profile Photo

Professor Carol O'Sullivan

Professor of Visual Computing (2010) (Computer Science)
Non College Properties

 Carol.OSullivan@tcd.ie

 3531896 1220


Carol O'Sullivan is the Professor of Visual Computing in Trinity College Dublin. From 2013-2016 she was a Senior Research Scientist at Disney Research in Los Angeles, and spent a sabbatical year as Visiting Professor in Seoul National University from 2012-2013. Prior to her PhD studies, she spent several years in industry working in Software Development. She joined TCD as a lecturer in 1997 and served as the Dean of Graduate Studies from Jul'2007 to Jul'2010. She was elected a fellow of Trinity College in 2003 and of the European Association for Computer Graphics (Eurographics) in 2007. Her research interests include graphics and perception, animation, and crowd and human simulation. She has managed a range of projects with significant budgets during that time and successfully supervised many doctoral and post-doctoral researchers. She has been a member of many editorial boards and international program committees (including ACM SIGGRAPH and Eurographics). She is currently the Editor in Chief of the ACM Transactions on Graphics and previously served as Editor in Chief for the ACM Transactions on Applied Perception from 2006-2012. Recently, she has served as the Technical Papers chair for ACM SIGGRAPH Asia 2021 and the Courses chair for SIGGRAPH Asia 2018.
  ANIMATION   COLLISION HANDLING   Computer Animation   Computer Graphics   Computer Graphics & Vision   Computer Modelling   EVALUATION   EYE MOVEMENTS   GRAPHICS AND PERCEPTION   INTERACTIVE COMPUTER GRAPHICS   PERCEPTION   SIMULATION LEVELS OF DETAIL   Virtual Reality   VISUALIZATION
Project Title
 VERVE
From
Oct 2011
To
Sept 2014
Summary
Funding Agency
EU ICT
Project Title
 Metropolis
From
2007
To
2010
Summary
The Metropolis project is a novel interdisciplinary project combining computer graphics, engineering and cognitive neuroscience research. Trinity College researchers Prof. Carol O'Sullivan and Dr. Steven Collins from Computer Science together with Dr. Fiona Newell from the Institute of Neuroscience and Prof. Henry Rice from Mechanical Engineering will apply principles of human multisensory perception to create the most realistic, scalable and large-scale simulations of populated cities ever realised. The aim of the research is to simulate large crowds consisting of millions of people and to introduce a high level of variety in animation, appearance and sound, inspired by perceptual models and metrics. Real meaning will be added to the simulations by endowing individual crowd members with appropriate, sentient behaviours that are based on cognitive and sociological models. Furthermore, realistic populace and traffic noise will be simulated, effectively propagated depending on environmental factors, and driven by psychoacoustic principles. The project will build upon TCD's ongoing Virtual Dublin project. The effectiveness of this research will be demonstrated in the areas of games (thereby contributing to the growth of an emergent entertainment industry in Ireland), environmental impact statements (EIS) for improved planning, and outreach activities to create assistive technology for disabled children.
Funding Agency
Science Foundation Ireland
Programme
Investigator Programme
Project Title
 GUILD: Generating Urban Infrastructures from LiDAR Data
From
2006
To
2009
Summary
This project involves automating the generation of three-dimensional computer models from aerial flyover data. LiDAR is a radar-based, laser scanning system, which can provide the technological under-pinnings to create automated three-dimensional Finite Element Modelling (FEM) meshes. The project leverages substantial previous investment in the form of the Virtual Dublin project.
Funding Agency
Science Foundation Ireland
Project Type
PICA award (Collaborator)
Project Title
 Geopostors: A Game Developers toolkit for Real-Time Crowds
From
2006
To
2007
Summary
Building on our real-time crowd system, we are developing a cost-effective tool that could be deployed by games developers to add large realistic crowds to their simulations.
Funding Agency
Enterprise Ireland
Programme
Proof of Concept
Project Title
 A Shared-Memory Hybrid Graphics Cluster for Visualisation and Video Processing
From
2004
To
2007
Summary
Funding Agency
Science Foundation Ireland
Programme
Basic Research/Research Frontiers Programme

Page 1 of 3
Details Date
Co-Editor in Chief, ACM Transactions on Applied Perception (TAP) 2008-2012
Associate Editor in Chief (Special Issues), IEEE Computer Graphics & Applications (formerly editorial board member) 2007-
Program Co-chair, APGV 2009: ACM SIGGRAPH Symposium on Applied Perception in Graphics and Visualization 2009
Member Papers Committee, ACM SIGGRAPH 2010,2009,2007,2006, 2004, 2003
IPC member, EUROGRAPHICS 2004, 2005, 2006, 2008, 2009
Associate Editor, ACM Transactions on Applied Perception
Associate Editor, Computers and Graphics (Elsevier)
Co-chair, Eurographics: the 26th annual conference of the European Association for Computer Graphics. 2005
Member Editorial Board, Graphical Models (Elsevier) 2007-
Co-chair - SCA: ACM SIGGRAPH/EUROGRAPHICS Symposium on Computer Animation 2006
Member IPC, I3D: ACM Symposium on Interactive 3D Graphics 2005-2007
Member IPC, SCA: ACM SIGGRAPH/EUROGRAPHICS Symposium on Computer Animation 2002-2006
Steering Committee member for the SIGGRAPH/EUROGRAPHICS Symposium on Computer Animation 2002-date
Co-chair and co-organiser: ACM SIGGRAPH/EUROGRAPHICS Campfire on Perceptually-Adaptive Graphics Snowbird, Utah May 2001
Co-chair and co-organiser of the Eurographics Ireland 2002 Workshop, Dublin March 2002
Co-organiser of the International Symposium on Virtual and Augmented Architecture (VAA01), Dublin June 2001.
Co-chair and organiser of the First Irish Workshop on Eye-Tracking, Dublin May 2000.
Member IPC, APGV: ACM Symposium on Applied Perception in Graphics and Visualization 2004-2007
Member IPC, V-Crowds 2005
Member IPC, IEEE Virtual Reality 2007
Member IPC, CASA: Computer Animation and Social Agents 2003-2007
Member IPC, ETRA: ACM SIGGRAPH/SIGCHI symposium on Eye Tracking Research & Applications, 2002, 2004 2002, 2004
Member IPC, VAST: International Symposium on Virtual Reality, Archaeology and Cultural Heritage 2004-2005
Member IPC, WSCG: International Conferences in Central Europe on Computer Graphics, Visualization and Computer Vision 2002-2006
Member IPC, EG-IRELAND: Irish Workshop on Computer Graphics, 2002-2005
Member IPC, VAA: International Symposium on Virtual and Augmented Architecture 2001
Reviewer for various journals, e.g., ACM Transactions on Graphics, IEEE CG&A, Presence, Computer Graphics Forum, The Visual Computer, and other journals and books. -
Reviewer for various conference and symposia, e.g., Eurographics Symposia on Rendering, Eurographics Symposia on Geometry Processing -
Language Skill Reading Skill Writing Skill Speaking
English Fluent Fluent Fluent
German Fluent Medium Fluent
Details Date From Date To
Member ACM SIGGRAPH 2000 date
Xiaohan Sun; Carol O"Sullivan, Still2Scene: Hybrid Gaussian Environments for Virtual Production, Eurographics 2026: 47th Annual Conference of the European Association for Computer Graphics, Aachen, Germany, 4"8 May 2026, The Eurographics Association, 2026, Conference Paper, PUBLISHED  TARA - Full Text  DOI  URL
Xiaohan Sun and Carol O'Sullivan, From Far and Near: Perceptual Evaluation of Crowd Representations Across Levels of Detail, 2026, Journal Article, IN_PRESS
Ostrek, Mirela and Mitra, Niloy J. and O'Sullivan, Carol, Neuropostors: Neural Geometry-Aware 3D Crowd Character Impostors, ICPR, 2025, Conference Paper, PUBLISHED  DOI
Ostrek, Mirela and O'Sullivan, Caroland Black, Michael J.and Thies, Justus, Synthesizing Environment-Specific People in Photographs, ECCV, 2025, Conference Paper, PUBLISHED  DOI
Bharat Vyas, Carol O'Sullivan, Shape Shifters: Does Body Shape Change the Perception of Small-Scale Crowd Motions?, Virtual Humans and Crowds in Immersive Environments (VHCIE) Workshop at IEEE VR 2025, 2025, pp705 - 710, Conference Paper, PUBLISHED  DOI
Xiaohan Sun, Yinghan Xu, John Dingliana and Carol O'Sullivan, Evaluating CrowdSplat: Perceived Level of Detail for Gaussian Crowds, Virtual Humans and Crowds in Immersive Environments (VHCIE)Workshop at IEEE VR 2025, 2025, Conference Paper, PUBLISHED  DOI
Sun, X., Xu, Y., Dingliana, J., O'Sullivan, C., CrowdSplat: Exploring Gaussian Splatting For Crowd Rendering, 26th Irish Machine Vision and Image Processing Conference (IMVIP 2024), 2024, (10), 2024, pp311-314 , Conference Paper, PUBLISHED  DOI
Vyas, Bharat, O'Sullivan, Carol, ShapeVerse: Physics-based Characters with Varied Body Shapes, Eurographics 2024 - Posters, 2024, Conference Paper, PUBLISHED
Yamac, G., O'sullivan, C., Neff, M., Understanding the Impact of Visual and Kinematic Information on the Perception of Physicality Errors, ACM Transactions on Applied Perception, 22, (1), 2024, Journal Article, PUBLISHED
Jason Lawrence, Ye Pan, Dan B Goldman, Rachel McDonnell, Carol O'Sullivan, Dave Luebke, Koki Nagano, Michael Zollhoefer, and Jason Saragih, State of the Art in Telepresence (Part 1), ACM SIGGRAPH 2023 Courses, Los Angeles, USA., 2023, 2023, Conference Paper, PUBLISHED  DOI  URL
  

Page 1 of 23
Carol O'Sullivan, Building, Populating and Evaluating Virtual Worlds, Intel European Research and Innovation Conference, September, 2008, Invited Talk, PRESENTED
Carol O'Sullivan, Building and populating a virtual city, Invited Talk, Tecnologico de Monterrey, Campus Estado de Mexico, February, 2008, Invited Talk, PRESENTED
Carol O'Sullivan, Metropolis - Multisensory Crowd Simulation, IEEE VR Workshop on Virtual Cityscapes, Reno, Nevada, March, 2008, Invited Talk, PRESENTED
Carol O'Sullivan, Wahrnehmungsgesteuerte Animation von grossen virtuellen Menschenansammlungen, Invited Talk, University of Bielefeld, Germany, February, 2008, Invited Talk, PRESENTED
Carol O'Sullivan, Wahrnehmungsgesteuerte Animation von grossen virtuellen Menschenansammlungen, , University of Karlsruhe, July, 2007, Invited Talk, PRESENTED
O'Sullivan, C., Building and populating a Virtual City, Invited talk, National Centre for Geocomputation, National University of Ireland, Maynooth, May , 2007, Invited Talk, PRESENTED
O'Sullivan, C., Everything you always wanted to know about Sex Perception * but were afraid to ask, Dagstuhl Seminar on Visual Computing- Convergence of Computer Graphics and Computer Vision , Schloss Dagstuhl, Germany, April, 2007, Invited Talk, PRESENTED
O'Sullivan, C., Metropolis: Populating a Virtual City with Supercrowds., Invited Talk, Computer Science, Carnegie-Mellon University, Pittsburgh PA, April , 2007, Invited Talk, PRESENTED
O'Sullivan, C., Metropolis: Populating a Virtual City with Supercrowds, Invited Talk, Computer Science, North Carolina State University, February, 2007, Invited Talk, PRESENTED
O'Sullivan, C., Metropolis: Populating a Virtual City with Supercrowds, Invited Talk, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, February, 2007, Invited Talk, PRESENTED

  


Page 1 of 3
Award Date
Elected Fellow of Trinity College Dublin 2003
Computer Graphics, Animation, Perception, Perceptually Adaptive Graphics, Physically Based Animation, Collision Handling, Visualisation, Visualization.