Dr. Richard Kennaway

Contact Information:

Electronic Mail: jrk@cmp.uea.ac.uk
Telephone: (01603) 593212
Fax: (01603) 593345
Room: 6/2.12

Current teaching

I am giving the lectures on Prolog as part of the following courses in 2011-12:

Research

My current research interests include virtual reality, control theory, robotics, and modelling of biological systems. In the past I have also worked on term rewriting, graph rewriting, higher order rewriting, category theory, concurrency and functional languages.

Numerical modelling of plant growth

In collaboration with Andrew Bangham, Rico Coen, and others I am developing models of plant growth based on numerical solution of differential equations for elasticity, growth, and diffusion.

Real-time procedural humanoid animation

I have been involved with the ViSiCAST and eSign projects, and am currently working on the Dicta-Sign project, whose aims are automatically generated virtual deaf signing for broadcast television and web sites. I designed and implemented SiGML (Signing Gesture Markup Language), an XML language based on the Hamburg Notation System for describing the physical components of signs, and developed algorithms for avatar-independent real-time procedural animation of signs described in SiGML. Currently I am working on an improved version of SiGML with a simpler structure, to be applicable to a wider range of human movement.

Perceptual control theory and robotics

Perceptual control theory is a branch of control theory due to William Powers which appears highly suitable to the study of living organisms. As a demonstrator project in the use of PCT to design the control architecture for a complex control task, I am constructing (as yet only in simulation) a six-legged walking robot based on PCT principles.

Virtual reality

I have in the past been involved in the following projects:

Reanimation of combat simulation log files for after-action review. (Collaboration with Defence Evaluation Research Agency (DEFRA).) This involved analysing log files from combat simulators and generating a virtual reality movie of the action in VRML.
Virtual reality modelling of landscapes, for visualising the predicted effects of landscape management policies. (In collaboration with Andrew Lovett in the School of Environmental Sciences.)

Term rewriting and graph rewriting as models of computation

This is a field in which I am no longer active.

My publications.

My official home page.

Conferences relevant to my current interests.

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