Scheduling Visual Routines

                   Dana Ballard and Nathan Sprague

We address the overall goal of having a complete model of an agent
that has a repertoire of visuo-motor behaviors. Generating such a
model may now be approachable by studying synthetic vision in virtual
humans. A synthetic visuo-motor system has been implemented on D-
Guys, graphic figures that have human-scale degrees of movement. The
main feature of our design is the partition of visuo-motor behaviors
into low-level routines that are selected by a scheduling mechanism
based on the current context. Such a mechanism plays the role of
attention in human visuo-motor behaviors. Preliminary results of such
a system show tradeoffs between bottom-up and top-down processing.


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Dana Ballard obtained the PhD degree from the University of California
at Irvine in 1974. During 1974-1975 he had a post-doctoral appointment
at the Laboratorio Tecnologie Biomediche in Rome, Italy. Since 1975 he
has been at the University of Rochester in the Computer Science
Department where he has the rank of professor. He is the coauthor with
Professor Brown of "Computer Vision,"(Prentice-Hall, 1982), and a recent
text "An Introduction to Natural Computation"(MIT Press 1997) that is
a general advanced introduction to mathematical models of the brain.

Ballard's current research focus is in computational theories of the
brain that account for its real-time performance. In 1985 with Chris
Brown, he led led a team that designed and built the first high speed
binocular camera control system capable of simulating human saccadic
eye movements. Recently he has extended his interests to the use of
Virtual Reality equipment, both for robot modeling and human
behavioral studies. He is the principal investigator in the National
Institute of Health's Research Resource at Rochester, a set of
multidisciplinary laboratories focusing on neural models of behavior.