IMPA has first thesis defense in the metaverse of Brazil
IMPA student Caio Lucas Souza defended his doctoral thesis no metaverso – the first carried out in the augmented reality environment in Brazil. The feat was highlighted in the column by Ancelmo Gois, from Jornal O Globo. Entitled “Virtual Intelligent Agents”, the work addresses machine learning techniques, combining graphics and artificial intelligence in real time. One of the examples of his work is a virtual dog which responds to commands and interacts with people accessing Visgraf's metaverse.
“One very interesting thing about IMPA is that everyone gets excited about math and that's what happened. At first, we didn't know exactly what to do, but we started thinking about machine learning models from a virtual magic cube, which we programmed to solve itself. So, we started to build the dog's behaviors, adjusting and creating new things”, said Caio.
The idea of defending the thesis in the metaverse came from Luiz Velho, advisor to Caio and lead researcher at Visgraf (IMPA's Computer Graphics Laboratory), and from Jorge Lopes, coordinator of technological projects at IMPA.--nbsp ;
“One thing IMPA always does is to pioneer new technologies! We are doing research and innovation on the science of the future. Caio's thesis will certainly be read by many companies and researchers who will be using these ideas in a few years!” added Luiz Velho.
The virtual dog created by Caio is defined as an autonomous agent, that is, it was programmed to learn behaviors such as looking at the person who enters the metaverse environment, running after a stick, receiving affection and barking. One of the future directions pointed out by the doctoral student and the advisor is the possibility of studying the behavior of a real dog to create an avatar that learns from this “observation”.
“The area we work with is multidisciplinary, ranging from mathematics itself to engineering, art and science. Of course, it requires the rigor of mathematics, above all because it is experimental. We can test, simulate and really see if it worked”, Luiz Velho.
For Caio, the experience of presenting his thesis in the metaverse was very exciting, because he was able to put what he learned from his doctorate into practice. “It was great to have developed the thesis! We did a lot of proof of concept, but I feel that we managed to evolve and deliver a cool work”, he added.
