Aniket Bera
University of MarylandAssistant Research Professor
Iribe Center Room 5144
8125 Paint Branch Drive
College Park, MD 20742
Phone: (301) 405-4209
email: ab [at] cs.umd.edu
Aniket Bera
University of MarylandAssistant Research Professor
Iribe Center Room 5144
8125 Paint Branch Drive
College Park, MD 20742
Phone: (301) 405-4209
email: ab [at] cs.umd.edu
About
Dr. Aniket Bera is an Assistant Research Professor at the Department of Computer Science with appointments/affiliations with the UMIACS, Maryland Robotics Center, Brain and Behavior Institute. Prior to this, he was a Research Assistant Professor at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He received his Ph.D. in 2017 from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is also the founder of Project Dost.
His core research interests are in Affective Computing, Computer Graphics (AR/VR, Augmented Intelligence, Multi-Agent Simulation), Social Robotics, Autonomous Agents, Cognitive modeling and planning for intelligent characters.
He is a faculty with the GAMMA group and has advised and co-advised over multiple M.S. and Ph.D. students. He has authored over 60+ papers, 1200+ citations and his work has won multiple awards at top Graphics/VR conferences. He also works with the University of Maryland at Baltimore Medical School to build algorithms and systems to help therapists and doctors detect mental health and social anxiety issues. His research involves novel combinations of methods and collaborations in machine learning, computational psychology, computer graphics, and physically-based simulation to develop real-time computational models to learn human behaviors. Dr. Bera has previously worked in many research labs, including Disney Research, Intel, and Centre for Development of Advanced Computing.
Dr. Bera's research has been featured on CBS, WIRED, Forbes, FastCompany, Times of India etc.
PROSPECTIVE STUDENTS:
- If you're looking for graduate admissions, please apply to UMD CS (https://www.cs.umd.edu/grad/catalog) and mention my name and research interests. Please note that all admission decisions are taken by the committee.
- If you're already a student at UMD, the best way to increase the chances of a response to an e-mail is to read one of my recent papers and include a concise paragraph with the benefits and drawbacks of the main idea as well as possible improvements you'd be interested to try and send me an email with your CV and background.
🗣 Updates/News
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10/01/2021🏆 Honorable Mention in ISMAR 2021 for Redirected Walking in Static and Dynamic Scenes Using Visibility Polygons (🎉Awarded 3 Virtual Reality awards in 2021🎉)
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08/09/2021Conference Chair for ACM SIGGRAPH MIG 2022 (Website/Details Soon!)
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07/16/2021Organizing Indian Contextual Emotion Learning Challenge at IEEE FG2021 with IIIT-Delhi
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05/02/2021🥇 Runner-up for Innovate Maryland Invention of the Year for M3ER: Multiplicative Mulimodal Emotion Recognition using Facial, Textual, and Speech Cues
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04/01/2021🏆 Best Paper Award in IEEE Virtual Reality 2021 for Text2Gestures: A Transformer-Based Network for Generating Emotive Body Gestures for Virtual Agents
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04/01/2021🏆 Honorable Mention in IEEE Virtual Reality 2021 for ARC: Alignment-based Redirection Controller for Redirected Walking in Complex Environments
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03/22/2021Grant Awarded by Maryland Department of Health on Virtual Embodiment in VR (Initiative on Adaptive Stress Response for individuals in a High-Risk Occupation) (Principal Investigator)
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12/14/2020Grant Awarded by "Maryland Department of Transportation State Highway Administration"
(Principal Investigator) -
9/5/2020"A New Meaning for Mental Health ‘Screening’" Maryland Today covers our on-going Mental Health research in-collaboration with the Medical School at Baltimore
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12/1/2020Grant Awarded by "Department of Defense DURIP" (Co-Principal Investigator)
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9/5/2020"Sci-Fi Social Distancing?" Maryland Today covers our on-going COVID-19 Robot research
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9/1/2020"UMIACS Faculty Receive MPower Funding to Improve Mental Telehealth Services Using AI" MPower Grant Coverage by UMD UMIACS
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9/1/2020"Aniket Bera and Dinesh Manocha Receive the 2020 Brain and Behavior Initiative Seed Grant" BBI Grant Coverage by UMD CS
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8/4/2020Grant Awarded by "University of Maryland MPower Grant" COVID-19 Initiative (Principal Investigator)
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6/24/2020Grant Awarded by "UMD Brain and Behavior Initiative" (Principal Investigator)
📰 Media Coverage
📖 Latest Publications
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Redirected Walking in Static and Dynamic ScenesUsing Visibility Polygons
TVCG and ISMAR 2021 Journal Papers Conference Papers
Niall L. Williams, Aniket Bera, Dinesh Manocha
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Can a Robot Trust You? A DRL-Based Approach to Trust-Driven Human-Guided Navigation
ICRA 2021 Conference Papers
Vishnu Sashank Dorbala, Arjun Srinivasan Ambalam, Aniket Bera
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Text2Gestures: A Transformer-Based Network for Generating Emotive Body Gestures for Virtual Agents
IEEE VR 2020 Conference Papers 🏆Best Paper Award
Uttaran Bhattacharya, Nicholas Rewkowski, Abhishek Banerjee, Pooja Guhan, Aniket Bera, Dinesh Manocha
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Multimodal and Context-Aware Emotion Perception Model with Multiplicative Fusion
IEEE Multimedia Journal Papers
Trisha Mittal, Aniket Bera, Dinesh Manocha
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ARC: Alignment-based Redirection Controller for Redirected Walking in Complex Environments
TVCG and IEEE VR 2020 Journal Papers Conference Papers 🏆Best Paper Award
Niall L. Williams, Aniket Bera, Dinesh Manocha
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Learning Unseen Emotions from Gestures via Semantically-Conditioned Zero-Shot Perception with Adversarial Autoencoders
arXiv preprint arXiv:2009.08906
Abhishek Banerjee, Uttaran Bhattacharya, Aniket Bera
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Generating Emotive Gaits for Virtual Agents Using Affect-Based Autoregression
ISMAR 2020 Conference Papers
Uttaran Bhattacharya, Nicholas Rewkowski, Pooja Guhan, Niall L. Williams, Trisha Mittal, Aniket Bera, Dinesh Manocha
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Emotions Don't Lie: A Deepfake Detection Method using Audio-Visual Affective Cues
ACM MM 2020 Conference Papers
Trisha Mittal, Uttaran Bhattacharya, Rohan Chandra, Aniket Bera, Dinesh Manocha
Funding agencies and collaborators
Students Supervised/Co-Supervised
Current Students:
- · Pooja Guhan (UMD, PhD Advisor)
· Niall Williams (UMD, PhD Co-Advisor)
· Vishnu Sashank Dorbala (UMD, PhD Advisor)
· Rohan Chandra (UMD)
· Jiayi Xu (April) (UNC)
· Uttaran Bhattacharya (UMD)
· Trisha Mittal (UMD)
· Ritwika Das (UMD)
· Ria Gupta (IIIT-D)
· Ruhma Mehek Khan (IIIT-D)
· Chetan Alla (UMD)
· Evar Jones (UMD, MS Advisor)
· Jason Fotso-Puepi (UMD)
Past Students:
- · Tanmay Randhavane (UNC, now at Microsoft)
· Ernest Cheung (UNC, now at Samsung)
· Vasavi Gajarla (UNC, now at Facebook)
· Janakiraman Kirthivasan (UMD)
· Jack Sturtevant (UMD)
· Rohan Chabra (UNC, now at Facebook Reality Labs)
· Rohan Prinja (UNC, now at Google)
· Austin Wang (UNC)
· Pooja Kabra (UMD)
· Anson Wong (The Chinese University of Hong Kong)
· Husam Shaik (UNC)
· Changhao Liu (UNC)
· Josh Taekman (UNC)
· Anshuman Singh (UMD)
· Rahul Madhogarhia (National Institute of Technology Karnataka, India)
· Mehul Arora (Indian Institute of Information Technology Allahabad, India)
· Arjun Ambalam (UMD)
· Arpit Maclay (UMD)
· Videsh Suman (University of Massachusetts Amherst)
· Abhishek Banerjee (UMD)
· Rama Prashanth Ramasamy Vijayakumar (UMD)
· Bala Sai Sudhakar (UMD)
· Venkatraman Narayanan (UMD)
"I think everyone should learn how to program a computer, because it teaches you how to think. I view computer science as a liberal art, something everyone should learn to do." - Steve Jobs
Artwork by Ashley Trinh, Inspiration by Paul Kube