Tiago Ribeiro
Principal Research Engineer, Autonomous Animation
Soul Machines
formerly GAIPS @ INESC-ID
Lisbon, Portugal
I am an eclectic scientist and engineer who’s major pursuit is the connection between arts and intelligent, interactive technology.
My major work has been on robots that interact with people, in various contexts such as entertainment, education, personal- or labour- assistance, etc. Within those fields, I have accumulated 9 years of expertise in animation and behaviour management technology for autonomous social robots.
Technically my expertise includes programming lower-level software that controls robots, to high-level animation tools and plug-ins that are suitable for non-technical personnel and end-users, such as artists and psychologists, and also all the middleware that is required to integrate such tools and robots with socially-aware artificial intelligence that drives the interaction.
More recently I moved back into the Intelligent Virtual Characters field by joining an award-winning team at Soul Machines, where I’m developing animation systems and technology that allow our digital heros to convey the same Illusion of Life while interacting with humans in smart environments.
In summary, my job is to create technology that allows creating such artificial intelligence creatures.
My connection with the arts is very personal, and is driven in most part by my passion for animation, but also for digital film and photography, three particular fields on which I am mostly self-taught and also explore as a hobby. These creative abilities and understanding, allied with my technical background, have allowed me to stand together with both artists, roboticists, social-scientists and software-engineers, to bring them together and build a bridge between all those worlds.
By working together and in multi-disciplinary settings, we are better able to materialize our imagination into real, physical achievements, and to push all those fields forward into the future.
- Artificial Intelligence
- Animation
- Robot Animation
- Human-Robot Interaction
- Social Robotics
- Interaction Design
- Affective Computing
PhD in Computer Science & Engineering, 2020
Instituto Superior Técnico, University of Lisbon
MSc in Computer Science & Engineering, 2011
Instituto Superior Técnico, University of Lisbon
BSc in Computer Science & Engineering, 2008
Instituto Superior Técnico, University of Lisbon
High School, 2004
Escola Secundária José Estêvão, Aveiro
Skills
Experience
AGI company that provides Digital People for a variety of markets
Responsibilities include:
- Lead the technical and architectural development of the autonomous animation system.
- Participate in the product strategy with feedback from/to technology development.
- Promote, support and lead the transfer of research into product.
- Invent mechanisms that enable autonomous animation of digital characters.
- Work with artists to ensure the animated motion looks natural and is fail-safe.
- Establish directives for autonomous behaviour design and selection.
- Provide guidelines for expressive behaviour of emotion and personality.
- Define instruments to measure animate and interactive qualities of autonomous digital characters.
AGI company that provides Digital People for a variety of markets
Responsibilities include:
- Designing and developing the skeletal animation system for autonomous digital humans
- Working with artists to ensure the animated motion looks natural and is fail-safe
- Inventing mechanisms that enable autonomous animation of digital characters
- Establishing directives for behaviour design and selection by AI
- Providing guidelines for expressive behaviour of emotion and personality by and AI
Smart food company
- Created custom ETL pipeline using Python from various sources into Google BigQuery.
- Datascience tasks using Google’s BigQuery SQL, DataStudio and Spreadsheets.
University College
Provided consulting on the HRI architecture aimed at the use of the NAO and Pepper robots
Contemporary Art Gallery
Exhibition ‘PLAY’, conceived by the NYC-based artists Urs Fischer, with Madeline Hollander Provided consulting on Robot Animation, development of robot animation tools (Maya, Houdini), and development of interactive behaviour simulation in Unreal Engine.
Reseach Lab
- Developed an HRI platform for various projects and robots
- Provided guidance and assistance to various MSc and PhD student project
Embodied Perceptive Tutors for Empathy-Based Learning
- Research Assistant
- Architecture Design & Development,
- Behaviour Management & Animation
LIving with Robots and Embodied Companions
- Research Assistant
- Robot Animation System
Projects
Adelino
2017-
my Craft Robot
EMOTE project
2013-2015
embodied perceptive tutors for empathy-based learning
LIREC Project
2011-2012
LIving with Robots and intEractive Companions
PLAY by Urs Fischer
Interactive Robotic Installation at the Gagosian Gallery, New York.
SERA Ecosystem
Socially Expressive Robotics Architecture
Nutty Tracks
2013-
Programmable symbolic animation system for robot animation.
Thalamus Framework
Message-passing middleware developed for social robot applications