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Professor Rachel Mc Donnell

Professor In (Computer Science)
Non College Properties

 ramcdonn@tcd.ie

 3531896 8436


Research Tags

  Computer & Video Games   Computer Animation   Computer Graphics   Computer Graphics & Vision   Computer Science   HUMAN COMPUTER INTERACTION

Research Projects

 RADICal: on-set virtual Reality for Actors portraying DIgital Characters
 Game Face: Perceptually Optimised Real-Time Facial Animation
 Cartoon Motion: Stylised facial animation from motion capture

Representations

Details Date
Advisory board for Eurographics 2022
Associate Editor for ACM Transactions on Applied Perception 2013-current
Associate Editor for the Journal of Eurographics, the European Association for Computer Graphics (Computer Graphics Forum) 2014, 2021
Editorial board for Frontiers in Virtual Reality Journal. 2019
Eurographics Program Committee Member 2012
External Examiner for PhD defence at INRIA, Rennes, France. 2022
Program Chair for Symposium on Applied Perception in Graphics and Visualization, Los Angeles, U.S.A. 2012
ACM SIGGRAPH Program Committee Member 2014
Acted as the external examiner for CGI Technical Artist Apprenticeship in Technical University Dublin. Examined all the student coursework and attended Exam Board meeting to give feedback on the apprenticeship. 2021
External Examiner for PhD defence at KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm. 2021
Program Committee Member for ACM SIGGRAPH Symposium on Applied Perception 2009
ACM SIGGRAPH Asia Program Committee Member 2021
Program Committee Member for CASA: Computer Animation and Social Agents conference 2012
Program Committee Member for ACM SIGGRAPH Conference on Motion in Games 2012
Program Committee Member for ACM SIGGRAPH/Eurographics Symposium on Computer Animation 2009
External Examiner for PhD defence at Brandenburg University of Technology Cottbus - Senftenberg 2020
Program Committee Member for IEEE VR 2019
Program Committee Member for ACM SIGGRAPH Interactive 3D Graphics and Games (I3D) 2018
ACM SIGGRAPH Asia Sketches and Posters Program Committee Member 2010

Languages

Language Skill Reading Skill Writing Skill Speaking
English Fluent Fluent Fluent
French Basic Basic Basic
Irish Medium Basic Medium

Memberships

Membership of Professional Institutions, Associations, Societies

Details Date From Date To
Association for Computing Machinery
Wisessing, P. and Mcdonnell, R., Blinded by the light: Does portrait lighting design affect perception of realistic virtual humans?, 2024, Notes: [cited By 0], Conference Paper, PUBLISHED  DOI
Jovane, A. and Egan, D. and Vargas, M.F. and Mythen, S. and McDonnell, R., Virtual Animal Embodiment for Actor Training, 2024, pp428-431 , Notes: [cited By 0], Conference Paper, PUBLISHED  DOI
Bigioi, D. and Basak, S. and StypuÅ'kowski, M. and Zieba, M. and Jordan, H. and McDonnell, R. and Corcoran, P., Speech driven video editing via an audio-conditioned diffusion model, Image and Vision Computing, 142, (104911), 2024, Notes: [cited By 1], Journal Article, PUBLISHED  DOI
Casey, L. and Dooley, J. and Codd, M. and Dahyot, R. and Cognetti, M. and Mullarkey, T. and Redmond, P. and Lacey, G., A real-time digital twin for active safety in an aircraft hangar, Frontiers in Virtual Reality, 5, (1372923), 2024, Notes: [cited By 0], Journal Article, PUBLISHED  DOI
He, Y. and Buck, L. and Rooney, B. and McDonnell, R., Effect of Avatar Clothing and User Personality on Group Dynamics in Virtual Reality, (19), 2023, Notes: [cited By 0], Conference Paper, PUBLISHED  DOI
Buck, L. and Young, G.W. and McDonnell, R., Avatar Customization, Personality, and the Perception of Work Group Inclusion in Immersive Virtual Reality, 2023, pp27-32 , Notes: [cited By 0], Conference Paper, PUBLISHED  DOI
Higgins, D. and Zhan, Y. and Cowan, B.R. and McDonnell, R., Investigating the effect of visual realism on empathic responses to emotionally expressive virtual humans, (5), 2023, Notes: [cited By 0], Conference Paper, PUBLISHED  DOI
Peña, P.R. and Doyle, P.R. and Garaialde, D. and Wu, Y. and McDonnell, R. and Cowan, B.R., Human Speakers Help Machine Listeners to account for Visual Asymmetries in Dialogue, (9), 2023, Notes: [cited By 0], Conference Paper, PUBLISHED  DOI
Peña, P.R. and Doyle, P.R. and Ip, E.Y. and Di Liberto, G. and Higgins, D. and McDonnell, R. and Branigan, H. and Gustafson, J. and McMillan, D. and Moore, R.J. and Cowan, B.R., A Special Interest Group on Developing Theories of Language Use in Interaction with Conversational User Interfaces, (509), 2023, Notes: [cited By 1], Conference Paper, PUBLISHED  DOI
Vargas, M.F. and Fribourg, R. and Bates, E. and McDonnell, R., Now I Wanna Be a Dog: Exploring the Impact of Audio and Tactile Feedback on Animal Embodiment, 2023, pp912-921 , Notes: [cited By 0], Conference Paper, PUBLISHED  DOI
  

Page 1 of 13
Appearance in, editor(s)B. Lugrin, C. Pelachaud, D. Traum , Handbook on Socially Interactive Agents, New York, United States, Association for Computing Machinery, 2021, [Rachel McDonnell, Bilge Mutlu], Book Chapter, PUBLISHED
Eduard Zell, Katja Zibrek, Xueni Pan, Marco Gillies, Rachel McDonnell, From Perception to Interaction with Virtual Characters, Eurographics 2020 - Tutorials, 2020, Review Article, PUBLISHED
McHugh, J.E., McDonnell, R., Chan, J.S. & Newell, F.N., The Multisensory Perception of Emotions in Real and Virtual Humans, British Psychological Society Annual Conference 2008, Dublin, April 2008, 2008, Poster, PRESENTED
Daniel Thalmann, Carol O'Sullivan, Barbara Yersin, Jonathan Maim, Rachel McDonnell, Populating Virtual Environments with Crowds, Eurographics Tutorials, 2007, Conference Paper, PUBLISHED

  

Awards and Honours

Award Date
Best Conference Paper at IEEE VR 2022
Graphics Replicability Stamp Initiative (GRSI) best paper award 2022
Best Paper Honorable Mention at ACM International Conference on Intelligent Virtual Agents (IVA) 2021
Selected as on of the top 5 papers at ACM Symposium on Applied Perception 2021
Fellowship, Trinity College Dublin 2020
Best Short Paper Award at ACM SIGGRAPH Conference on Motion, Interaction, and Games 2020
Best Paper Honorable Mention at ACM Symposium on Applied Perception 2020
Best Paper Award at ACM Symposium on Applied Perception 2019
Career Development Award (SFI) 2013
Best paper award (top 5) at ACM SIGGRAPH Conference on Motion in Games 2013

Research Interests

Description Of Research Interests

Creating virtual replicas of human beings, in both appearance and motion, is one of the greatest challenges in the field of Computer Graphics and beyond. My main research direction involves advancing the state-of-the-art in virtual humans, a highly competitive field with large investment from the top tech companies (Microsoft, Google, Meta, etc.). However, I am credited with a unique approach of using human perception to deepen our understanding of virtual humans and improve the technological advancements. I have made a significant impact by exploring the use of novel experiments to understand human perception of virtual beings. In particular, how photorealism can influence higher level concepts such as perceived emotion, personality, and trustworthiness. My work has been published at the top venues (including ACM TOG, TOCHI, TAP, CGF, CAG, IEEE VR, ISMAR, IVA, MIG, SAP since my last promotion) and I secured >€2.5M in research funding (€1.3M since my last promotion). I am a recognised world leader in virtual human research, as evidenced by an industry award of $85K from Epic Games, to collaborate on using perception to improve their high-fidelity 'Metahumans'. I also gave masterclasses on perception of virtual humans at Eurographics (Tutorial, 2020) and SIGGRAPH (Course, 2019). I am also a leader in embodied virtual human research, and credited as the first to use adversarial networks for automating the gesture behaviours of virtual agents. Our system is recognised as one of the current leading systems in AI gesture generation (cited 55 times since 2020). I have also been awarded funding from EI to investigate commercial feasibility and was invited as a leading expert to co-author a chapter in the ACM Handbook on Socially Interactive Agents. Finally, our Trinity-Speech-Gesture dataset was licensed to Electronic Arts Inc., who recognised the dataset as the gold-standard for speech-to-gesture systems.