Norman I. Badler ‘70 (CCS Creative Studies) Excited to Share His Autobiography—On Raising a Digital Human: A Personal Evolution
Badler, one of the first Mathematics students, references the College’s earliest days
Norman I. Badler ‘70 (CCS Creative Studies), one of the first students at the College of Creative Studies (CCS) and studied Mathematics, is excited to share the release of his autobiography: Raising a Digital Human: A Personal Evolution (Springer, 2024).
“There are certainly references to the earliest years of CCS.”
—Norman I. Badler ‘70 (CCS Creative Studies)
The Rachleff Professor of Computer and Information Science Emeritus at the University of Pennsylvania (Penn), Norman’s latest publication is part of the Synthesis Lectures on Computer Science that spans 13 books. In one of the first chapters, UCSB and the College of Creative Studies, he writes: “Circumstances landed me in the University of California at Santa Barbara. During Freshman year, I met my future wife Ginny [‘70 College of Letters & Science Art History], and we applied to and were accepted into a brand new College of Creative Studies at UCSB. This experience was seminal in building my math and teaching skills, but humbling next to the achievements of my peers in the Math program. I marry Ginny at the end of our Sophomore year.”
“My goal has been to build more “intelligence” into the digital humans we already possessed, moving them beyond computer graphics representations of body shape and motion.”
—Norman I. Badler ‘70 (Creative Studies)
From the publication’s synopsis: “This book tells the story of building digital virtual human models in the context of the background, choices, and occurrences that shaped the author's [Norman’s] own involvement and personal evolution. Such digital models found motivating applications in engineering, anthropology, medical, and group simulation problems, and numerous connections to other disciplines informed and enriched their design, development, and deployment.” This book will be of interest to readers who want to understand the history of virtual human beings, how they evolved, and especially how they must address numerous human characteristics to achieve any sense of “human-ness.”
Following CCS, Norman received a MSc in Mathematics from the University of Toronto in 1971 and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Toronto in 1975. His research involves developing software to acquire, simulate, animate, and control 3D computer graphics of the human body, face, gesture, locomotion, and manual task motions, both individually and for heterogeneous groups.
Norman was the keynote speaker at the College’s Commencement in June 2017 and was featured as one of 50 stories to celebrate the College’s 50 anniversary in 2017-18.
CCS congratulates Norman on his autobiography!