Periodic Reporting for period 2 - CfACTs (Centre for Applied Creative Technologies)
Período documentado: 2022-10-01 hasta 2025-12-31
Overall objectives:
CfACTs as a MSCA COFUND research training centre for experienced researchers (ERs) provides international mobility and cross-sectoral experience through the well-aligned training and research programme. It aims to support/promote research excellence. With the ERs’ research and innovation development on their chosen topics, it can bring significant change to the technological landscape by adopting novel creative technologies into various applications to promote well-being and innovation.
The CfACTs Fellow Programme (FP) offers experienced researchers (ERs) a formative academic and industry secondment experience, which is instrumental in forging the direction of their future international research careers as senior academics or industry leaders. The CfACTs has successfully recruited and trained 7 fellows to start research at Bournemouth University (BU) and associated partner organizations (POs) during the project period. Selected applicants demonstrated a track of record of internationally outstanding research outputs and proposed excellent project ideas supported by high quality research plans.
Problem/issue is being addressed:
CfACTs is engaged in developing innovative technologies to meet industry's needs. Latest trends in research have been identified with evidence in published research works and discussions with industrial peers, for example:
• AI automatic visual content analysis and generation combined with personalised computing; and
• Visual content generation in cognitive and visual processing terms
They have brought important productivity improvements to related sectors, including VFX, animation and games etc.
The recruited CfACTs ERs proposed projects to conduct research and develop new applied digital creative techniques, collaboratively with industry POs; and apply them for cross-sectoral applications including but not limited to, computer animation, visual effects (VFX), computer games, cultural heritage, etc. These new techniques have potential to bring major productivity improvements to related industries.
Cross-sectoral and multi-disciplinary exposure and exploitation are essential components of a CfACTs ER fellowship. CfACTs has established close working relationships with its POs (SIE, Visualskies, Framestore, Humain, etc.) to host placement opportunities for recruited fellows and support the exploitation of developed research outputs and intellectual properties (IPs).
CfACTs as a MSCA COFUND research training centre for experienced researchers (ERs) provides international mobility and cross-sectoral experience through the well-aligned training and research programme. It aims to support/promote research excellence. With the ERs’ research and innovation development on their chosen topics, it can bring significant change to the technological landscape by adopting novel creative technologies into various applications to promote well-being and innovation.
The CfACTs Fellow Programme (FP) offers experienced researchers (ERs) a formative academic and industry secondment experience, which is instrumental in forging the direction of their future international research careers as senior academics or industry leaders. The CfACTs has successfully recruited and trained 7 fellows to start research at Bournemouth University (BU) and associated partner organizations (POs) during the project period. Selected applicants demonstrated a track of record of internationally outstanding research outputs and proposed excellent project ideas supported by high quality research plans.
Problem/issue is being addressed:
CfACTs is engaged in developing innovative technologies to meet industry's needs. Latest trends in research have been identified with evidence in published research works and discussions with industrial peers, for example:
• AI automatic visual content analysis and generation combined with personalised computing; and
• Visual content generation in cognitive and visual processing terms
They have brought important productivity improvements to related sectors, including VFX, animation and games etc.
The recruited CfACTs ERs proposed projects to conduct research and develop new applied digital creative techniques, collaboratively with industry POs; and apply them for cross-sectoral applications including but not limited to, computer animation, visual effects (VFX), computer games, cultural heritage, etc. These new techniques have potential to bring major productivity improvements to related industries.
Cross-sectoral and multi-disciplinary exposure and exploitation are essential components of a CfACTs ER fellowship. CfACTs has established close working relationships with its POs (SIE, Visualskies, Framestore, Humain, etc.) to host placement opportunities for recruited fellows and support the exploitation of developed research outputs and intellectual properties (IPs).
The programme has effectively delivered on its objective of providing international mobility, multi‑disciplinary training, and intersectoral experience for experienced researchers, while generating high‑quality scientific outputs.
The research portfolio spans seven projects, addressing emerging challenges within creative technologies. Collectively, these projects have produced 11 peer‑reviewed publications, novel datasets, production‑oriented prototypes, and exploitation pathways aligned with industry partners.
Advanced 4K/8K Image and Video Upscaling for VFX Production: Developed deep‑learning super‑resolution methods achieving significant improvements in temporal stability, and HDR quality.
Digital Human Modelling and Animation: Delivered substantial advances in realistic digital‑human pipelines through real‑time audio‑driven facial‑animation systems, a new 4D face‑performance dataset, and a domain‑adaptive expression‑transfer framework.
Personalised and Persuasive Game Design: Investigated validated experimental protocols for affective‑game evaluation, revealing robust relationships between personality traits, emotional responses, and gameplay preferences.
AI‑Driven Train Track Infrastructure Monitoring: Tested and evaluated zoning, vegetation‑detection, and multi‑class object‑recognition algorithms for UAV‑based railway inspection.
GAN‑Based Ultra‑High‑Resolution Rendering and Image Generation: Introduced advanced GAN‑based pipelines combining latent‑space encoding, G‑buffer integration, cross‑attention fusion, and multi‑scale adversarial learning.
Sparse‑View 3D Reconstruction and Gaussian Splatting: Developed enhanced Gaussian‑Splatting‑based methods for high‑fidelity 3D reconstruction from sparse imagery, enabling accurate geometry and detail recovery with significantly fewer input images.
Emotionally Responsive Intelligent Virtual Characters: Crafted an innovative LLM‑driven dialogue framework integrating speech sentiment, gameplay context, and memory‑based reasoning to generate believable real‑time NPC interaction.
Across all projects, dissemination activities included presentations at nationally and internationally recognised venues such as CASA, CVMP, HCI International, SIGGRAPH‑associated workshops, BFX Festival, TechFusion Summit, and global industry events. Several exploitation pathways have already been established, including continued industrial collaboration with partner organisations, technology demonstration opportunities, and the development of new external funding proposals with partners from the creative industries and cultural‑heritage sectors.
The research portfolio spans seven projects, addressing emerging challenges within creative technologies. Collectively, these projects have produced 11 peer‑reviewed publications, novel datasets, production‑oriented prototypes, and exploitation pathways aligned with industry partners.
Advanced 4K/8K Image and Video Upscaling for VFX Production: Developed deep‑learning super‑resolution methods achieving significant improvements in temporal stability, and HDR quality.
Digital Human Modelling and Animation: Delivered substantial advances in realistic digital‑human pipelines through real‑time audio‑driven facial‑animation systems, a new 4D face‑performance dataset, and a domain‑adaptive expression‑transfer framework.
Personalised and Persuasive Game Design: Investigated validated experimental protocols for affective‑game evaluation, revealing robust relationships between personality traits, emotional responses, and gameplay preferences.
AI‑Driven Train Track Infrastructure Monitoring: Tested and evaluated zoning, vegetation‑detection, and multi‑class object‑recognition algorithms for UAV‑based railway inspection.
GAN‑Based Ultra‑High‑Resolution Rendering and Image Generation: Introduced advanced GAN‑based pipelines combining latent‑space encoding, G‑buffer integration, cross‑attention fusion, and multi‑scale adversarial learning.
Sparse‑View 3D Reconstruction and Gaussian Splatting: Developed enhanced Gaussian‑Splatting‑based methods for high‑fidelity 3D reconstruction from sparse imagery, enabling accurate geometry and detail recovery with significantly fewer input images.
Emotionally Responsive Intelligent Virtual Characters: Crafted an innovative LLM‑driven dialogue framework integrating speech sentiment, gameplay context, and memory‑based reasoning to generate believable real‑time NPC interaction.
Across all projects, dissemination activities included presentations at nationally and internationally recognised venues such as CASA, CVMP, HCI International, SIGGRAPH‑associated workshops, BFX Festival, TechFusion Summit, and global industry events. Several exploitation pathways have already been established, including continued industrial collaboration with partner organisations, technology demonstration opportunities, and the development of new external funding proposals with partners from the creative industries and cultural‑heritage sectors.
CfACTs contributes to deliver core training of advanced skills in the related digital sectors and provide cross-sectoral experience for the fellows. The CfACTs FP focuses on providing each ER with the specific skills and experiences they want to acquire to develop their research career; with particular emphasis on the different approaches and challenges of academia and the digital technology industry R&D sector. The core skills that each ER will develop through the CfACTs FP will be to:
1) Understand that the transition from academia to an industry environment can often be challenging for early career researchers. Industrial R&D is fast paced and based on rapid prototyping using established company knowledge and expertise; rather than the rigorous academic R&D approach of detailed literature review and use of defined methodologies. Masterclasses provided by CfACTs will upskill the ERs in rapid prototyping.
2) Developing the resilience required by researchers to work in challenging academia and industry R&D settings where failures are routine (e.g. failure of prototypes; rejection of research bids publications; loss of funding or sponsorship to continue R&D of a viable prototype etc.).
3) Developing key early career researcher skills including identifying funding sources and effective bid writing; open science and research data management, PE and networking with potential commercial partners; ethics and legal approvals; successful publishing.
4) Leadership and research project management skills developed through real tasks (e.g. CfACTs ERs leading on BU NCCA short term projects, and PO R&D projects.
Regional Level/National Level: CfACTs addresses the key priorities for highly skilled human resources for the digital technologies industry and academia at UK regional and national level. Creative Industries constitute 1 in 11 jobs in the UK and there is broad recognition that investment in research and innovation are crucial to improving the UK and EU competitiveness by boosting productivity (Investing in UK R&D, 2018). The UK industrial strategy (2017) aspires to increase R&D spending from 1.7% to 2.4% of GDP by 2027. Driven by innovations in AI and immersive technologies, research spending within creative industries will constitute a significant proportion of this increase.
1) Understand that the transition from academia to an industry environment can often be challenging for early career researchers. Industrial R&D is fast paced and based on rapid prototyping using established company knowledge and expertise; rather than the rigorous academic R&D approach of detailed literature review and use of defined methodologies. Masterclasses provided by CfACTs will upskill the ERs in rapid prototyping.
2) Developing the resilience required by researchers to work in challenging academia and industry R&D settings where failures are routine (e.g. failure of prototypes; rejection of research bids publications; loss of funding or sponsorship to continue R&D of a viable prototype etc.).
3) Developing key early career researcher skills including identifying funding sources and effective bid writing; open science and research data management, PE and networking with potential commercial partners; ethics and legal approvals; successful publishing.
4) Leadership and research project management skills developed through real tasks (e.g. CfACTs ERs leading on BU NCCA short term projects, and PO R&D projects.
Regional Level/National Level: CfACTs addresses the key priorities for highly skilled human resources for the digital technologies industry and academia at UK regional and national level. Creative Industries constitute 1 in 11 jobs in the UK and there is broad recognition that investment in research and innovation are crucial to improving the UK and EU competitiveness by boosting productivity (Investing in UK R&D, 2018). The UK industrial strategy (2017) aspires to increase R&D spending from 1.7% to 2.4% of GDP by 2027. Driven by innovations in AI and immersive technologies, research spending within creative industries will constitute a significant proportion of this increase.