[4eyes] FW: [FACULTY] Fwd: MAT Candidate Talk on Tuesday, 4/12

[Matthew Turk]

Another MAT faculty candidate talk of interest next week:

-----Original Message-----

MAT Candidate: Theodore Kim

Date: Tuesday, April 12
Time and Place: 5:00pm in 1001 ESB
Host: Marcos Novak

Title: Physics-Based Methods in Visual Design

We routinely consume the results of physics-based simulations in films
and games, but the number of designers who can leverage these
simulations to author novel motions has remained small. This is
unfortunate because simulations can produce results that would be
impossible using other methods, and they have the potential to
transform the way that visual motion is produced. In this talk, I will
describe several methods that collaborators and I have developed to
work towards making physics-based simulation a ubiquitous visual
design tool.

Fluid simulations can model smoke rising from a cigarette or a
volcanic eruption, but existing methods impede rapid design iteration
because motions roughed out at coarse, interactive resolutions are
totally invalidated when the resolution is increased. We have
developed a novel wavelet turbulence method that preserves the design
work performed at low resolutions and allows fine-scale detail to be
added quickly and automatically as a post-process. Our method is
widely used in industry, and has appeared in several recent films.

Increasingly sophisticated and time-consuming numerical methods are
being used to simulate virtual humans, but the final computed motions
are often "low-rank"; they can be summarized by a small set of
keyframes. "Reduced-order" methods provide a way to exploit this
keyframe intuition to obtain thousand-fold speedups that greatly
facilitate design work. I will describe a novel reduced-order method
that efficiently incorporates realistic, non-linear material
properties and dovetails naturally with existing character animation
techniques.

Bio:
Theodore Kim has been an Assistant Professor in Computer Science at
the University of Saskatchewan since the fall of 2009. Previously, he
was a Post-Doctoral Associate at Cornell University and at IBM TJ
Watson Research Center. He received his PhD in Computer Science from
the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2006. His current
research deals with the efficient numerical simulation of
high-dimensional physical systems for use in computer graphics and
animation. It also touches on parallel and multi-core algorithms,
haptic-rate simulations for virtual surgery, and computational
biomechanics. His research has appeared in several recent films,
including Alice in Wonderland, Sherlock Holmes, and Transformers:
Revenge of the Fallen.