Steven C. Dollins, Ph.D.
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| Steven C. Dollins, Ph.D. |
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I completed my Ph.D. in the Brown Computer Graphics Group in the Computer Science Department at Brown University in May, 2002.
I am currently the C.E.O. and portfolio manager for Dollins Investment Advisors, LLC in Fremont, California.
I maintain a page of Handy Mathematics Facts for Graphics.
My research interests include:
- Large scale, distributed virtual environments
- Procedural and multi-resolution modeling, animation, and computing
- Physical simulation including collision detection and response
- 3-D user interaction including navigation and object manipulation
- Game programming
- Kinetic art
- Applying object-oriented programming language technology to graphics systems
For my thesis, I worked on the authoring and plausible emulation of procedurally generated, multi-resolution geometry and behaviors for large scale, interactive virtual environments (the real goal is to come up with a thesis topic that is buzzword complete). By behaviors, I mean attributes of objects, such as their geometry, color, position, and motion, that change over time and in response to events triggered by time, by other entities in the world, or by the user.
For the spring of 1996, a group of students in our department created what at Brown is called a GISP, or Group Independent Study Project, on game programming for which I acted as one of the TAs. The course consisted of two parts: (1) a series of research topics presented by the students and followed up with small programming assignments and (2) a final project done as part of a small group. The topics we covered in the initial part of the course were:
- networking
- network topologies, UNIX sockets, data synchronization
- graphics
- coordinate systems, object geometry representations, DOOM-style texture-mapping
- simulation
- physical simulation, numerical methods, collision detection and response
- artificial intelligence
- autonomous agents interacting with an environment, state machines, path planning
- user interfaces
- defining and limiting user degrees of freedom, presentation of information
I received my Bachelor's degree in Mathematics and Computer Science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in May of 1992. While at UIUC, I was the chairperson for the student ACM SIGGRAPH. (I have been a member of the international ACM SIGGRAPH since 1990.) I also worked in the Software Technology Group at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA). They started work on Mosaic, the precursor to both Netscape Navigator and Microsoft's Internet Explorer, just as I left.
While at Illinois, I wrote a game called Netspace that became a project of the student SIGGRAPH and which we showed off at UIUC's Engineering Open House in both '91 and '92. Netspace was a networked, multi-player, outer space dogfight game that ran over a network of PCs using TCP/IP. The networking and much of the game play was written by Christopher Wilson and Jon Mittelhauser who worked with me at NCSA. After leaving Illinois, they went on to work on Microsoft's Internet Explorer and Netscape's Navigator, respectively.
I graduated from the Mt. Lebanon High School in 1988. Mt. Lebanon is a suburb in the South Hills of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania (which is at the western end of the state, near Ohio).
My family tree.
Most of my personal interests are reflected by my rather extensive list of bookmarks, many of which are probably out of date.
33400 Turnstone Pl.
Fremont, CA 94555
650-773-0725 (cell)
Email me at steven [at] dollins . org.
My PGP key.
1,742,455,67910 = steven36
