Dr. Richard Kennaway
Research
My current research interests include
virtual reality, control theory, robotics, and modelling of biological systems. In the past I have also worked on
term rewriting, graph rewriting, higher order rewriting, category theory,
concurrency and functional languages.
I am directly employed by the John Innes Centre, but maintain
visiting status at UEA and an email address.
Numerical modelling of plant growth
In collaboration with
Rico Coen
and others at the John Innes Centre,
and formerly the late
Andrew Bangham,
I am developing software for modelling plant growth based on the numerical solution
of differential equations for elasticity, growth, and diffusion.
The software, called GFtbox ("Growth Factor Toolbox") is described on the
Bangham Lab wiki.
GFtbox itself is publicly distributed through
sourceforge.
It is written in Matlab, so running it requires a
Matlab installation.
The documentation is rather out of date, but the general principles on
which the software runs have not changed.
The basic paper describing GFtbox and the underlying mathematical techniques is
published in
PLoS Computational Biology.
Real-time procedural humanoid animation
I have been involved with the
ViSiCAST and eSign
projects, and am currently working on the
Dicta-Sign project,
whose aims are
automatically generated virtual deaf signing for broadcast television
and web sites.
I designed and implemented SiGML (Signing Gesture Markup Language),
an XML language based on the Hamburg Notation System for
describing the physical components of signs, and developed algorithms for
avatar-independent real-time procedural
animation of signs described in SiGML.
Currently I am working on an improved version of SiGML with a simpler
structure, to be applicable to a wider range of human movement.
Perceptual control theory and robotics
Perceptual
control theory is a branch of control theory due to William Powers
which appears highly suitable to the study of living organisms. As a
demonstrator project in the use of PCT to design the control architecture for a
complex control task, I have constructed (only in simulation) a
six-legged walking
robot
based on PCT principles.
Virtual reality
I have in the past been involved in the
following projects:
- Reanimation of combat
simulation log files for after-action review.
(Collaboration with Defence Evaluation Research Agency (DEFRA).)
This involved analysing log files from combat simulators and
generating a virtual reality movie of the action in VRML.
- Virtual reality modelling of
landscapes, for visualising the predicted effects of landscape management
policies. (In collaboration with Andrew Lovett in the
School of Environmental
Sciences.)
Term rewriting and graph
rewriting as models of computation
This is a field in which I am no longer active.
Publications
Lists of my publications are available at:
The list at UEA is manually maintained (or not) and therefore may not be up to date.
Google Scholar, ResearchGate, and Academia.edu automatically scrape the web for publications.
Their lists are therefore more complete, but also include some duplicates and ephemera.
I am also on LinkedIn,
OrcID,
and ResearcherID.
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