Brown CS News

Earlier this year, the Association for Computing Machinery's Special Interest Group on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques (ACM SIGGRAPH) published the second volume of Seminal Graphics Papers: Pushing the Boundaries with the goal of collecting papers from 1974 onward that typify the conference's ground-breaking research. Of the eighty-eight works included, thirteen have authors who are past or present Brown CS faculty, staff, students, or alums.

“When I started Brown’s Graphics Group in 1965, and then on into the early 70s,” says Thomas J. Watson, Jr. University Professor of Technology and Education and Professor of Computer Science Andy van Dam, “we worked at all levels of the hardware and software stack. For example, we built special-purpose microprogrammed hardware that was the forerunner of today’s GPUs, and we were the first to use and publish Remote Procedure Calls for distributed multiprocessor computing, all for real-time 3D and 4D graphics. We also wrote applications, with a major focus on hypermedia. In the 90s, we were joined by Spike Hughes, and more recently by a variety of other super-talented younger faculty, greatly expanding the scope of Graphics to Visual Computing.”

The papers include:  

• SKETCH: An Interface for Sketching 3D Scenes is by Robert C. Zeleznik of Brown CS Research Staff, Brown CS faculty member John Hughes, and alum K.P. Herndon

• A Signal Processing Approach To Fair Surface Design is by Brown CS faculty member Gabriel Taubin

• A Practical Model for Subsurface Light Transport is by Brown CS alum Stephen R. Marschner and collaborators Henrik Wann Jensen, Marc Levoy, and Pat Hanrahan

• Computer-Generated Pen-and-Ink Illustration is by Brown CS alum David H. Salesin and collaborator Georges Winkenbach

• Interactive Pen-and-Ink Illustration is by Brown CS alums Ronen Barzel and David H. Salesin, with collaborators Michael P. Salisbury and Sean E Anderson

• Surface Light Fields for 3D Photography is by Brown CS alum David H. Salesin and collaborators Daniel N. Wood, Daniel I. Azuma, Ken Aldinger, Brian Curless, Tom Duchamp, and Werner Stuetzle

• Environment Matting and Compositing is by Brown CS alum David H. Salesin and collaborators Douglas E. Zongker, Dawn M. Werner, and Brian Curless

• Video Textures is by Brown CS alum David H. Salesin and collaborators Arno Schödl, Richard Szeliski, and Irfan Essa

• Image Analogies is by Brown CS alum David H. Salesin and collaborators Aaron Hertzmann, Charles E. Jacobs, Nuria Oliver, and Brian Curless

• Interactive Digital Photomontage is by Brown CS alums David H. Salesin and Steven M. Drucker, with collaborators Aseem Agarwala, Mira Dontcheva, Maneesh Agrawala, Alex Colburn, Brian Lee Curless, and Michael F. Cohen

• The Virtual Cinematographer: A Paradigm for Automatic Real-Time Camera Control and Directing is by Brown CS alum David H. Salesin and collaborators Li-wei He and Michael F. Cohen

• Elastically Deformable Models is by Brown CS alum Kurt Fleischer and collaborators Demetri Terzopoulos, John Platt, and Alan Barr

• SMPL: A Skinned Multi-Person Linear Model is by Brown CS alum Matthew Loper and former Brown CS faculty member Michael J. Black (now at Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems), with collaborators Naureen Mahmood, Javier Romero, and Gerard Pons-Moll

“Brown CS graphics researchers,” says Andy, “always included students at all levels, but mostly undergraduates. We were one of the earliest groups to feature the extensive use of undergrads in research and in coauthoring papers describing the systems they had worked on. Almost all of the Brown alum authors in the papers above got their start as superb undergraduate researchers. In particular, David Salesin, now leading a large research team at Google, once held the record for the highest number of papers, eight, in one year at SIGGRAPH, the premier CG conference.”

For more information, click the link that follows to contact Brown CS Communications Manager Jesse C. Polhemus.