Prior avatar embodiment research has studied tracking completeness (how faithfully the body, hands, and face are sensed and reproduced) and personalized appearance in isolation, each requiring specialized lab equipment. How these factors interact on consumer hardware remains an open question, because no existing system unifies body pose, face, hands, and personalized appearance on a standalone headset. We present FlowAvatar, a system enabling real-time personalized look-alike avatars with full-body pose, hand articulation, facial expression, and eye gaze tracking from sparse egocentric inputs on consumer XR devices (Meta Quest Pro). Our pose model achieves competitive spatial accuracy and state-of-the-art temporal consistency on the AMASS benchmark against prior works with comprehensive spatial and temporal losses validated through architecture and loss ablations, while running in real-time. Two user studies (N=12, N=10) provide converging evidence that tracking completeness and personalized appearance serve complementary roles: tracking completeness broadly improves perceived motion quality, while only their combination achieves positive total embodiment.
This publication proposes a definition and a classification of agile software development approaches and analyses ten software development methods that can be characterized as being "agile" against the defined criterion.
P. Abrahamsson, O. Salo, Jussi Ronkainen et al.· arXiv.org· 727 citations· ⚡54
The study shows that agile practices improve both informal and formal communication, but indicates that, in larger development situations involving multiple external stakeholders, a mismatch of adequate communication mechanisms can sometimes even hinder the communication.
M. Pikkarainen, Jukka Haikara, O. Salo et al.· Empirical Software Engineeri...· 401 citations· ⚡48
The results indicate that software engineering work practices are chosen opportunistically, adapted and configured to provide value under the constrains imposed by the startup context.
Nicolò Paternoster, Carmine Giardino, M. Unterkalmsteiner et al.· Information and Software Tec...· 394 citations· ⚡54
The possibility of inferring high-dimensional data inference in a model that consists of a prior and an auxiliary differentiable constraint given some additional information is considered, thereby allowing a range of potential applications in adapting models to new domains and tasks.
Alexandros Graikos, Esmeralda S. Whitammer, N. Jojic et al.· Neural Information Processin...· 316 citations· ⚡15
Jennifer Neville did not want to go into computer science—but that’s exactly where she landed. Neville discusses the starts and stops that led to her professional sweet spot and her work identifying “surprising failures” making it hard for AI to handle complexity. The post What AI gets wrong and what failure teaches us appeared first on Microsoft Research.
Computer scientist, entrepreneur, and philanthropist will collaborate with the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing to advance AI and scientific discovery.