In this thesis I present a fast, efficient, and production friendly method to generate a crowd of fully articulated characters. A wide variety of characters can be created from a relatively few base models. The models that are generated are anatomically different from each another, while maintaining the same topology. They all have individual characteristics and features, that distinguish them from the others in the crowd. This method is easily adaptable to different kinds of characters, from hyper-realistic characters to highly stylized characters, and from human characters to insects like spiders. The crowd character models generated by this method are fully articulated and are ready to be animated.

Les foules sont de plus en plus présentes dans les médias grands publics, comme le cinéma ou les jeux vidéo. Elles permettent de renforcer l'immersion du sujet dans l'environnement qui lui est présenté. Or, la création de mouvement de foule est la plus part du temps basé sur des modèles dures à prendre en main et qui n'offrent pas un contrôle direct sur le mouvement de foule que l'on souhaite créer. Dans cette thèse nous proposons des contributions sous forme de méthodes pour concevoir des mouvements de foules par le biais d'outils interactifs et intuitifs. Dans un premier temps, nous présentons une méthode interactive permettant de concevoir des foules en les déformant comme de l'argile. L'utilisateur peut tirer, compresser et torde la forme global de des foules pour leurs donner la forme qu'il ou elle souhaite. Les personnages qui composent la foule s'adaptent automatiquement à la nouvelle forme imposée par l'utilisateur. Dans un second temps, nous présentons une méthode permettant de peindre les mouvements et la densité de la foule pour la créer. Nous offrons la possibilité à l'utilisateur de créer des foules en peignant une carte de densité en niveau de gris, et une carte de mouvement via des dégradés. Ses cartes de couleurs sont utilisées par notre système pour le transformer en un mouvement de foule, via un algorithme itératif cherchant à optimiser les différentes valeurs des cartes de couleurs. Les foules obtenues par ces méthodes peuvent occupées un espace très large, et sont animées indéfiniment. Contrairement aux méthodes classiques de création de foules qui se basent sur l'ajustement de paramètres de modèles, nos méthodes permettent de concevoir les mouvements de foules en se basant sur des caractéristiques plus hauts niveaux de la foule, comme sa forme globale, ses mouvements internes ou sa densité. Ce qui offre la possibilité de créer du contenu de foule animée de manière simple, rapide et intuitif. / Crowds are increasingly present in audio-visual media, such as movies or video games. They help to strengthen the immersion of the subject in the virtual environment. However, creating crowds is most of the time based on models hard to master and which do not offer a direct control on the motion that you want to create. In this thesis we propose contributions for designing crowd motions through interactive and intuitive tools. Firstly, we present an interactive method for designing the crowds by distorting it like clay. The user can stretch, compress and twist the overall shape of the crowd to give it the shape he or she wishes. The inner characters of the crowd automatically adapt to the new shape imposed by the user. Secondly, we present a method to paint the motion and the density of the crowd to create it. We offer the opportunity to the user to create crowds by painting a grayscale density map and a motion map by gradients. Its colored maps are transformed by our system to crowds, thanks to our iterative algorithm seeking to optimize the different values of colored maps. Crowds obtained by these methods can occupy a very large space and are animated indefinitely. Unlike conventional methods of creating crowds, that are based on the adjustment of model parameters, our methods allow to design crowd motions based on higher level features of the crowd, as its overall shape, its internal movement or density. This offers the possibility to simply, quickly and intuitively create animated crowd contents.

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Researchers have examined crowd behaviour in the past by employing a variety of methods including ethnographic studies, computer vision techniques and manual annotation-based data analysis. However, because of the resources to collect, process and analyse data, it remains difficult to obtain large data sets for study. Mobile phones offer easier means for data collection that is easy to analyse and can preserve the user's privacy. The aim of this thesis is to identify and model different qualities of social interactions inside crowds using mobile sensing technology. This Ph.D. research makes three main contributions centred around the mobile sensing and crowd sensing area. Firstly, an open-source licensed mobile sensing framework is developed, named SensingKit, that is capable of collecting mobile sensor data from iOS and Android devices, supporting most sensors available in modern smartphones. The framework has been evaluated in a case study that investigates the pedestrian gait synchronisation phenomenon. Secondly, a novel algorithm based on graph theory is proposed capable of detecting stationary social interactions within crowds. It uses sensor data available in a modern smartphone device, such as the Bluetooth Smart (BLE) sensor, as an indication of user proximity, and accelerometer sensor, as an indication of each user's motion state. Finally, a machine learning model is introduced that uses multi-modal mobile sensor data extracted from Bluetooth Smart, accelerometer and gyroscope sensors. The validation was performed using a relatively large dataset with 24 participants, where they were asked to socialise with each other for 45 minutes. By using supervised machine learning based on gradient-boosted trees, a performance increase of 26.7% was achieved over a proximity-based approach. Such model can be beneficial to the design and implementation of in-the-wild crowd behavioural analysis, design of influence strategies, and algorithms for crowd reconfiguration.

Anti-Terrorism has been a global issue and video surveillance has become increasingly popular in public places e.g. banks, airports, public squares, casinos, etc. However, when encountered with the crowd environment, conventional surveillance technologies will have difficulties in understanding human behaviors in crowded environment. / Firstly, I developed a learning-based algorithm for people counting task in crowded environment. The main difference between this method and traditional ones is that it adopts separated blobs as the input of the people number estimator. The blobs are selected according to their features after background estimation and calibration by tracking. After this, each selected blob in the scene is trained to predict the number of persons in the blob and the people number estimator is formed by combining trained sub-estimators according to a pre-defined rule. / In the last part, I discussed the method to analyze the crowd motion from a different angle: by video energies. I mainly use the defined energies to identify the human crowd density and human abnormal behaviors in the crowd. I define two categories of video energies based on intensity variation and motion features and adopt two surveillance methods for the two energies accordingly. Using wavelet analysis of the energy curves, I obtained a result which shows that both methods can be used to deal with crowd modeling and real-time surveillance satisfactorily. / In this thesis, I address the problem of crowd surveillance and present the methodology of how to model and monitor the crowd. The methodology is mainly based on motion features of crowd under human constrains. By utilizing this methodology, dynamic velocity field is extracted and later used for learning. Thereafter, learning technology based on appropriate features will enable the system to classify the crowd motion and behaviors. In this thesis, I tried four topics in crowd modeling and the contributions are in the following areas, namely, (1) robust people counting in crowded environment, (2) the detection and identification of abnormal behaviors in crowded environment, (3) modeling crowd behaviors via human motion constrains, and (4) modeling crowd behaviors using crowd energy. / Secondly, I introduced a human abnormal behavior identification system in the crowd based on optical flow features. Optical flow calculation is applied to obtain the velocity field of the raw images and the corresponding optical flows in the foreground are selected and processed. Then, the optical flows are encoded by support vector machine to identify the abnormal behaviors of humans in crowded environments. Experimental results show that this method can handle some places where it is very crowded while the traditional methods can not. / The work in this thesis has provided a theoretical framework for crowd modeling research and also proposed corresponding algorithms to understand crowd behaviors. Moreover, it has potential applications in areas such as security monitoring in public regions, and pedestrian fluxes control, etc. / Thirdly, I discussed how crowd modeling using human motion constrains is realized and the quantitative evaluation is given. I declare that the human motion patterns can be added to increase the accuracy and robustness of abnormal behavior identification. In more detail, I applied Bayesian rules to optimize the optical flow calculation result. I also declare that the motion pattern of crowd is similar with that of water when the environment become very crowded and corresponding rules are applied. / Ye, Weizhong. / "May 2008." / Adviser: Yangsheng Xu. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 70-03, Section: A, page: 0724. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2008. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 75-85). / Electronic reproduction. Hong Kong : Chinese University of Hong Kong, [2012] System requirements: Adobe Acrobat Reader. Available via World Wide Web. / Electronic reproduction. [Ann Arbor, MI] : ProQuest Information and Learning, [200-] System requirements: Adobe Acrobat Reader. Available via World Wide Web. / Abstracts in English and Chinese. / School code: 1307.

This thesis is a work of literary journalism that explores the distinct boundaries in style that partition how a writer reports objective facts and reveals subjective experience. In brief, it is a genre-breaking prose composition that weds objective and subjective narratives in an organic, but necessary harmony. As a subject, it explores the author?s experiences at two National Boy Scout Jamborees, held in the summers of 1997 and 2010. The thesis fuses two unique narrative modes into a hybrid form that exhibits entirely new qualities and values. It alternates between first-person and third-person points of view to create an uncomfortable, yet necessary tension, suggesting that the story?s accuracy is dependent upon two different perspectives. The thesis relies upon an unreliable narrator, whose story is reappraised by a credible third-person narrator. This thesis should be read as an agonizing reappraisal that examines American society at the turn of the millennia and during the first decade of the twenty-first century. Several American authors, including F. Scott Fitzgerald, Robert Lowell, and Norman Mailer, have periodically explored this retrospective mode. While it is not a canonical genre, the agonizing reappraisal allows the author to comment on the past and present simultaneously. In this thesis, the effect is achieved by pairing two unique narratives that are separated by more than a decade in time.

Crowd simulation plays a critical role in modern films, games, and architectural design. However, despite decades of algorithmic improvements, crowds use sub-optimal heuristics, are primarily constrained to 2D surfaces, and show few if any social dynamics. This dissertation proposes that a solution to these problems lies in altering how each agent perceives its environment as opposed to new obstacle avoidance algorithms. First, this dissertation presents a theoretical look at optimal agent movement. Next, in order to place crowds on arbitrary 3D manifolds, algorithms are proposed that change how each agent perceives its environment. The resulting crowds move naturally across a large range of surfaces with up to 100,000 triangles in real-time. Additionally, these algorithms are shown to work in real-time strategy game settings by using the GPU to determine which parts of the surface are visible to each agent. Results show that these algorithms can do visibility testing for up to 200 agents in real-time. Lastly, these same principles are used to create believable social dynamics with crowds based on the transactional analysis area of psychology. These social dynamics allow agents to stop and talk, pair walk, and have repeated social interactions. All this is done by changing how agents perceive the world based on their social reward.

The following Bachelor’s thesis explores the different uses of crowdsourcing by private organisations and analyses them internally, in terms of strategic capabilities. The purpose of this Bachelor’s thesis is to show the reader the different internal strategic issues resulting from the use of crowdsourcing by private organisations. The authors focused namely on crowd creation, crowdfunding and crowd voting through three private organisations using one of these types respectively in their business processes. The qualitative research was conducted through a multiple case study design and through interviews for the primary data collection. The results from the research varied from case to case. Firstly, the Ricola case has shown that crowd creation can especially have impacts on its physical strategic capabilities. Secondly, La Biscuiterie Jeannette’s case has indicated that crowdfunding strongly impacts its financial strategic capabilities. Thirdly, the case of Schneider has enabled to highlight on the one hand the growing importance of crowd voting and on the other hand that crowd voting had no major impacts on its strategic capabilities, yet. Finally, this research intended to give inspiration to other researchers into the field of crowdsourcing and its three subtypes. Therefore, this thesis can be a basis for further researches in this field.

The purpose of this thesis is to investigate whether a specific method of financing, so called Crowd Funding, CF, can be applied on the Swedish housing market. Limitations are made to the housing market of Stockholm since it is different in many ways from the housing market in the rest of the country. Real estate is only mentioned as examples of items in different funding methods when the new solution is aimed primarily for the condominium market. Problems are identified and investigated through interviews with officials involved in funding. Preliminary there is a historical background to the proposal, various needs that have arisen and why. The background includes the concept of CF as a method, its application and what it is that makes it so successful. This is followed by an overview of the conventional lending market in Sweden and an overview of a range of alternative financing methods that could be applied to the condominium property today. A solution based on a combination of CF and conventional mortgages is presented. It also follows issues that must be investigated and resolved in connection with the use of CF in combination with conventional mortgages. The problems are discussed in interviews with relevant officials and presented under the heading Results of the investigations. A brief overview of client funds and client accounts is provided as background for the reader to follow the reasoning that follows. Finally, there is a draft legally tenable agreement that could be applied to the presented solution. The thesis discusses legal parties and concepts in situations that might arise. Under alternative financing methods situations are discussed between lenders and borrowers. Lenders are usually institutional lenders, but may include private lenders as well. Borrowers are generally individuals. The whole relationship is built up as a form of credit where the risk premium is paid in a form of an option. This means that the funding schemes are mixed in a new form of financing, why the parties' names also may be mixed. / Syftet med denna uppsats är att undersöka om en specifik finansieringsmetod, så kallad Crowd Funding, CF, går att tillämpa på den svenska bostadsrättsmarknaden. Avgränsningar görs till Stockholms bostadsrättsmarknad då denna skiljer sig på många sätt från bostadsmarknaden i resten av landet. Fastigheter tas endast upp som exempel på objekt inom finansieringsmetoder då den nya lösningen i första hand riktar sig till bostadsrättsobjekt. Problem identifieras och utreds genom intervjuer med funktionärer som arbetar med finansiering. Inledande presenteras bakgrunden till förslaget, olika behov som har uppstått och varför. Bakgrunden innefattar begreppet CF som metod, hur den tillämpats och vad det är som gör den så framgångsrik. Därefter ges en översikt över den konventionella lånemarknaden i Sverige och en översikt över en rad alternativa finansieringar som skulle kunna tillämpas på bostadsrättsobjekt idag. . En potentiell lösning av finansieringsproblematiken presenteras i form av ett förslag som innebär en kombination av CF och konventionella lån. Vidare följer problem som måste undersökas och lösas i samband med användning av CF och konventionella lån. Problemen diskuteras i intervjuer med relevanta funktionärer och presenteras under rubriken "Resultat från undersökningar" En kort översikt om klientmedel och klientmedelskonton ges som bakgrund till läsaren för att kunna följa resonemanget som följer. Slutligen presenteras ett utkast till juridiskt hållbart avtal som skulle kunna tillämpas på CF. I uppsatsen diskuteras juridiska parter och begrepp i situation som kan tänkas uppstå. Under alternativa finansieringsmetoder diskuteras situationer mellan långivare och låntagare. Långivare är normalt institutionella kreditgivare men kan även innefatta mer privata kreditgivare. Låntagare är generellt endast privatpersoner. Under avsnittet där CF helt eller delvis tillämpas på bostäder, benämns kreditgivare som investerare eller finansiär beroende på finansieringsform. Låntagaren, köpare av bostaden, benämns kredittagaren. Hela förhållandet är uppbyggt som en form av kreditgivning där riskpremien betalas ut i en form av option. Detta innebär att finansieringsmetoderna blandas i en ny form av finansiering, varför parternas benämningar också kan komma att blandas.

We propose a method to determine the flow of large crowds of agents in a scene such that it is filled to its capacity with a coordinated, dynamically moving crowd. Our approach provides a focus on cooperative control across the entire crowd. This is done with a view to providing a method which animators can use to easily populate and fill a scene. We solve this global planning problem by first finding the topology of the scene using a Reeb graph, which is computed from a Harmonic field of the environment. The Maximum flow can then be calculated across this graph detailing how the agents should move through the space. This information is converted back from the topological level to the geometric using a route planner and the Harmonic field. We provide evidence of the system’s effectiveness in creating dynamic motion through comparison to a recent method. We also demonstrate how this system allows the crowd to be controlled globally with a couple of simple intuitive controls and how it can be useful for the purpose of designing buildings and providing control in team sports.