William Bares

 

College of Charleston                                       Office phone: 843-953-6601

Department of Computer Science                     E-mail: bareswh@cofc.edu

66 George St                                                      Web page: https://blogs.cofc.edu/bareswh/

Charleston SC 29424

 

Research Interests

My research in Computer Science education aims to broaden participation in computing through the motivating context of the arts.  I am currently exploring how to translate excitement about movies featuring Computer-generated Imagery (CGI) into increased curiosity and engagement with mathematics and computing.  My research in computer graphics and artificial intelligence seeks to develop intelligent assistants that can collaborate with creative human storytellers to block characters and cameras for theatre or film.

 

 Education History

• Ph.D. in Computer Science from North Carolina State University, 1998 • Dissertation title: Real-time Generation of User and Context-Sensitive Three-Dimensional Animated Explanations, advised by James Lester and Woodrow Robbins
• M.S. in Computer Science from North Carolina State University, 1994
• Honors B.S. in Computer Science from University of Southwestern Louisiana, 1992 • Thesis title: A Hypermedia System for the Authoring of Scientific Journal Articles, advised by Dennis Moreau

Employment History

• Associate Professor, College of Charleston, Department of Computer Science, 2019 – present
• Assistant Professor, College of Charleston, Department of Computer Science, 2013 – 2019
• Associate Professor, Millsaps College, Department of Computer Science, 2009-2013
• Assistant Professor, Millsaps College, Department of Computer Science, 2003-2009
• Research Scientist, LiveWire Logic, Inc., Morrisville, NC. Intelligent natural-language processing for a customer service virtual agent, 2000-2003
• Assistant Professor, Center for Advanced Computer Studies, University of Louisiana at Lafayette, 1998-2001

 

List of Courses Taught (College of Charleston)

CITA/CSCI 120 Animation and Virtual Worlds (fall 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019)

CITA/CSCI 180 Computers, Music, and Art (fall 2014)

CITA/CSCI 210/280 Game Programming (spring 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019)

CSCI 215 Web Page Programming (spring 2017, 2018)

CSCI 220/L Computer Science I and lab (fall 2015)

CSCI 230 Data Structures and Algorithms (fall 2013)

CSCI 310 Advanced Algorithms (spring 2014)

CSCI 340 Operating Systems (fall 2019)

CITA 295 (now CITA 395) Computing in the Arts Seminar (fall 2014, 2015, f/s 2016-2019)

CSCI 397 Research Experience (spring 2014, spring 2017/18, summer 2017/18)

CSCI 399 Tutorial (spring 2014/15/16/18)

CSCI 480 Computer Graphics (spring 2014)

CITA 495 Computing in the Arts Capstone Practicum (fall 2014, spring 2015, f/s 2016-2019)

CSCI 499 Bachelor’s Essay (Smoak AY 2015, Requierme AY 2016, Sims AY 2017, Blanchett AY 2018, Albertsen AY 2018)

DATA 495 Data Science Capstone Seminar (spring 2015, 2016)

 

List of Courses Taught (Millsaps College)

First-year seminar in the liberal arts: Creation from Myths to Megabytes – themes of creation from ancient myths, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Asimov’s robots, and artificial intelligence

Computer Science I – Introduction to Computer Science

Computer Science II – design & analysis of algorithms taught in a 6-hour per week intensive lab

Computer Organization and Assembly Language using the MIPS processor

Digital Media Programming – Image processing and Animation using Java

Operating Systems

Computer Graphics – OpenGL in C++

Artificial Intelligence – Topics in algorithms for search, planning, and optimization

 

 List of Publications (at CofC fall 2013 – present)

* Denotes student co-authors

William H. Bares, Bill Manaris, Renée McCauley, and Christine Moore. 2019. Achieving Gender Balance through Creative Expression. In ACM SIGGRAPH 2019 Educators Forum (SIGGRAPH ’19), ACM, New York, NY, USA.

William H. Bares, Bill Manaris, Renée McCauley, and Christine Moore. 2019. Achieving Gender Balance through Creative Expression. In Proceedings of the 50th ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education (SIGCSE ’19). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 293-299. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/3287324.3287435

William Bares, Bill Manaris & Renée McCauley. 2018. Gender equity in computer science through computing in the arts – a six-year longitudinal study, In Computer Science Education, 28:3, 191-210, DOI: 10.1080/08993408.2018.1519322

Bares, William; Requierme, Caroline*; Obisesan, Elizabeth*. 2017. Film Ties: A Web-based Virtual 3D Lab for Teaching the Film Art from Script to Blocking. In Eurographics Workshop on Intelligent Cinematography and Editing.

William Bares and Donald Schwartz. 2016. Film Ties: Crowd-sourced Teaching of Cinematography Using Intelligent Example Galleries. In Proceedings of the 19th ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing Companion (CSCW ’16 Companion). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 229-232. Overall CSCW acceptance rate of 26% (1,376 of 5,237 submissions).

Donald Schwartz and Willia Bares.  2016.  FilmTies: A Web-based Tool for Teaching 3-D Cinematography.  In The 2016 International Conference on Frontiers in Education: Computer Science and Computer Engineering, pp. 136-141.

William Bares, Donald Schwartz, Cristovam Segundo*, Santoshi Nitya*, Sydney Aiken*, and Clinton Medbery*. 2015. Film Ties: An Architecture for Collaborative Data-driven Cinematography. In Proceedings of Eurographics Workshop on Intelligent Cinematography and Editing. Eurographics Association. Zurich, Switzerland, May 4, 2015, 63-68.

Bill Manaris, Renée McCauley, Marian Mazzone, and William Bares. 2014. Computing in the arts: a model curriculum. In Proceedings of the 45th ACM technical symposium on Computer science education (SIGCSE ’14). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 451-456.

 

List of Publications (prior to 2013)

Christophe Lino, Marc Christie, Roberto Ranon, and William Bares. 2011. The director’s lens: an intelligent assistant for virtual cinematography. In Proceedings of the 19th ACM international conference on Multimedia (MM ’11). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 323-332.

William Bares, Nick Buckner*, and Daniel Castille*. 2010. Virtual camera scouting with 3DOF motion trackers. In Proceedings of the 48th Annual Southeast Regional Conference (ACM SE ’10). ACM, New York, NY, USA, Article 91, 2 pages.

William Bares. 2008. Panel Beat: Layout and Timing of Comic Panels. In Proceedings of the 9th international symposium on Smart Graphics (SG ’08), Andreas Butz, Brian Fisher, Antonio Krueger, Patrick Olivier, and Marc Christie (Eds.). Springer-Verlag, Berlin, Heidelberg, 273-276.

Amav Jhala, William Bares, and R. Michael Young. 2005. Towards an intelligent storyboarding tool for 3D games. In Proceedings of the 2005 ACM SIGCHI International Conference on Advances in computer entertainment technology (ACE ’05). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 367-368.

Scott McDermott*, Junwei Li*, and William Bares. 2002. Storyboard frame editing for cinematic composition. In Proceedings of the 7th international conference on Intelligent user interfaces (IUI ’02). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 206-207.

William Bares and Byungwoo Kim*. 2001. Generating virtual camera compositions. In Proceedings of the 6th international conference on Intelligent user interfaces (IUI ’01). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 9-12.

William Bares, Scott McDermott*, Christina Boudreaux*, and Somying Thainimit*. 2000. Virtual 3D camera composition from frame constraints. In Proceedings of the eighth ACM international conference on Multimedia(MULTIMEDIA ’00). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 177-186.

Brent H. Daniel, Charles B. Callaway, William H. Bares, and James C. Lester. 1999. Student-sensitive multimodal explanation generation for 3D learning environments. In Proceedings of the sixteenth national conference on Artificial intelligence and the eleventh Innovative applications of artificial intelligence conference innovative applications of artificial intelligence (AAAI ’99/IAAI ’99). American Association for Artificial Intelligence, Menlo Park, CA, USA, 114-120.

James C. Lester, Luke S. Zettlemoyer, Joël P. Grégoire, and William H. Bares. 1999. Explanatory lifelike avatars: performing user-centered tasks in 3D learning environments. In Proceedings of the third annual conference on Autonomous Agents (AGENTS ’99), Oren Etzioni, Jörg P. Müller, and Jeffrey M. Bradshaw (Eds.). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 24-31.

William H. Bares and James C. Lester. 1998. Intelligent multi-shot visualization interfaces for dynamic 3D worlds. In Proceedings of the 4th international conference on Intelligent user interfaces (IUI ’99). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 119-126. (* best paper award)

William H. Bares, Luke S. Zettlemoyer, and James C. Lester. 1998. Habitable 3D Learning Environments for Situated Learning. In Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITS ’98), Barry P. Goettl, Henry M. Halff, Carol L. Redfield, and Valerie J. Shute (Eds.). Springer-Verlag, London, UK, UK, 76-85.

William H. Bares, Joël P. Grégoire, and James C. Lester. 1998. Realtime constraint-based cinematography for complex interactive 3D worlds. In Proceedings of the fifteenth national/tenth conference on Artificial intelligence/Innovative applications of artificial intelligence (AAAI ’98/IAAI ’98). American Association for Artificial Intelligence, Menlo Park, CA, USA, 1101-1106.

William H. Bares, Luke S. Zettlemoyer, Dennis W. Rodriguez, and James C. Lester. 1998. Task-sensitive cinematography interfaces for interactive 3D learning environments. In Proceedings of the 3rd international conference on Intelligent user interfaces (IUI ’98). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 81-88.

William H. Bares and James C. Lester. 1997. Realtime generation of customized 3D animated explanations for knowledge-based learning environments. In Proceedings of the fourteenth national conference on artificial intelligence and ninth conference on Innovative applications of artificial intelligence (AAAI’97/IAAI’97). AAAI Press 347-354.

 

Patents

• Method, system and software program for shooting and editing a film comprising at least one image of a 3D computer-generated animation. This patent is based on and extends concepts presented in “Director’s Lens”: ACM Multimedia 2011 that introduces a novel workflow in which a user collaborates with an intelligent system that proposes suggested camera viewpoints that are computed as a function of composition properties of previously created viewpoints. European patent number: EP 2600316 A1 and United States, Patent number: US20130135315

 

Grants (External Funding)

Teaming Agreement with Natural Point

NaturalPoint grants College of Charleston use of motion capture equipment (four Prime 13W cameras, calibration tools, rigid body markers) and continually renewed Motive Tracker software licenses valued at $12,000 in exchange for access to this equipment to be stored in the College’s Virtual Production Lab (Harbor Walk East, Room 333).

Grants (Internal Funding)

College of Charleston – School of Science and Math summer 2019 undergraduate research funding for Katie Chea who developed CS Unplugged activities to teach mathematics concepts used in creating computer animations.  Katie’s results were used in the summer 2019 outreach camp titled ‘Coding Movie Magic.’

College of Charleston – School of Science and Math summer 2018 undergraduate research funding for Alexandra Shope who developed a Hidden-Markov Model that was used to learn shot editing sequences for given story events.  This software was used in a summer 2018 outreach camp titled ‘Computing in the Movies.’

College of Charleston – SURF: Visualizing Narrative and Cinematic Choices in Virtual Reality Stories with student Ron Taylor. Proposal written together in fall 2015. Research work conducted during summer of 2016.

College of Charleston – Faculty development grant $3,140 for fall 2016 round 1 to purchase virtual reality equipment (HTC Vive) and software to support summer student research projects.

 

Honors Bachelor’s Essays Supervised

William Blanchett (fall 2018 – spring 2019) – Study of computer-generated overtone music.

Noah Albertsen (fall 2018 – spring 2019) – Computer-generated woodcut printing

Baylee Sims (fall 2017 – spring 2018) – Study of perceptions of computer-generated art

Caroline Requierme (fall 2016 – spring 2017) – Virtual 3D blocking for theatre

Mandy Smoak (fall 2015 – spring 2016) A Study of the Rule of Thirds and its use in Cinematography

 

Outreach Teaching / Mentoring of Non-College of Charleston Students

Summer 2019: Taught a five-day summer camp titled ‘Coding Movie Magic’ for the Dorchester District II Summer Scholars program for grades 4-7.

Fall 2018-Spring 2019: Hosted four sessions with Charleston Young Artists Guild to introduce computing in the arts, using AI to generate art & film, and green-screen image processing.

Summer 2018: Hosting Jia Jun Chai from Institute of Technology at University of La Rochelle, France. Jia Jun is developing algorithms to filter motion-capture motion paths into editable spline curve paths.

Summer 2018: Supervising Alexandra Shope in exploring machine-learning techniques for modeling cinematography.

Summer 2018: Teaching Honors College Summer Institute workshop – Computing in the Movies (June 11-15) – five-day course applying data science techniques to filmmaking.

Summer 2017: Hosted SC Governor’s School student Yasmin Coker who explored using 3-D animation software to recreate a movie scene.

Summer 2017: Hosted exchange internship student Romain Simon from Institute of Technology at University of La Rochelle, France. Romain researched and implemented Python and JavaScript code prototypes to perform various machine learning methods including clustering of virtual 3-D camera shots, similarity metric for text comments about films, and GUI mockups for soliciting crowd-sourced feedback about aspects of cinematography.

Summer 2016: Hosted Howard Hughes Medical Institute program student Zames Frasier from North Charleston High School. Zames participated in designing a virtual reality game.

Summer 2016: Hosted SC Governor’s School student Brennora Cameron. Brennora participated in designing a virtual reality game.

Summer 2016: Hosted exchange internship student Julien Triau from Institute of Technology at University of La Rochelle, France. Julien explored existing clustering algorithms to apply to virtual camera compositions and natural language texts.

Summer 2015: Hosted SC Governor’s School student Justin Smith. Justin conducted research to assemble a corpus of examples of critique and analysis of camera shots from film textbooks.

Summer 2015: Hosted exchange internship student Jean Cellier from Institute of Technology at University of La Rochelle, France. Jean contributed to JavaScript coding for a Web-based film education program and explored use of K-Means clustering with an assist from Dr. Brent Munsell.

Spring-fall 2015: Served as outside mentor for Thomas Bennett of Academic Magnet High School. Thomas created a game based on Mars survival.

Summer 2014: Hosted SC Governor’s School student William Blanchett. William worked with a group of CofC undergraduates to help create animated scene content for a Web-based film education program. William is currently a CITA major.

Fall 2014-spring 2015: Served as outside mentor for Nancy Fang of Academic Magnet High School. Nancy created a Scratch game that featured different visual portrayals of protagonist by gender and conducted a survey to analyze player perceptions.