Professor Soraia Raupp Musse

Soraia Raupp Musse has conducted postdoctoral research at the University of Pennsylvania (USA). She has a PhD in Sciences and a MsC in Virtual reality from École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Switzerland, a MsC from Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil, and a BA in Informatics from Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil. She is currently a CNPq research fellow.

She does research into Computer Graphics, with several projects in Computer Animation and Graphic Simulation. She has been working with Crowd Simulation and Virtual Humans Crowds since 1996.

In 2007, she published her first international book in the area of Crowd Simulation – the first of a series of 4 books -, by Springer-Verlag, Germany. She is the second most cited researcher in the area of Crowd Simulation, and the most cited one in the area of Pedestrian Simulation, on Google Scholar.

Soraia has won different international and national awards, such as the Prêmio Santander de Ciência e Inovação in 2013. She has also served as a keynote speaker in several international events. Soraia has worked with important names such as Daniel Thalmann and Norman Badler, in the area of Virtual Humans Simulation.

The researcher got into Computer Science to study Computer Graphics in 1990 and always wanted to work with animation and behavior simulation. She could see this area evolve as she worked on her scientific production.

Soraia believes that the more diverse a population is, the more innovative and creative we are. “Group and crowd simulation studies show us that the more diverse, the more varied solutions are proposed, the more possibilities we have. Collective intelligence is powerful and is most competent when the population is more heterogeneous, as more different ideas are thought and more solutions are proposed.”