Distinguished Guest Lecturer

THE NEXT LEAP IN COMPUTER GRAPHICS AND VISUALIZATION RESEARCH

David S. Ebert
School of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Purdue University

3:30; Thurs., Oct. 30th,. 480 Dreese Labs
Refreshments will be served at 3:18 in Dreese 480.
All are invited to attend.

Abstract
Recent PC graphics hardware advances and improvements in rendering techniques have made high-quality computer graphics faster and more prevalent. Does this mean research in graphics and visualization is mainly completed? Have we reached our goal? Is there more than realism and real-time? In this talk, I'll describe our direction of research beyond realistic rendering and visualization to address what we consider to be the primary purpose of graphics and visualization: effective conveyance of information to the user. Most scientists, doctors, analysts, and even computer animators are faced with a data deluge. They must analyze, extract meaningful information, and create solutions from huge quantities of data, whose size is increasing at an enormous rate. However, screen resolution, image generation techniques, and visualization techniques are only making modest improvements. This has led us to take a different approach to image generation and visualization that we call perceptualization. I'll describe how we are developing new algorithms for managing terabyte datasets, developing new algorithms to harness the power of desktop graphics hardware, incorporating perceptually motivated techniques and multiple perceptual channels, and utilizing a wide range of rendering techniques to effectively convey information. We are also developing visualization techniques that are at a higher, more effective level than traditional techniques that require the user to examine gigabytes to terabytes of data. Example applications we are exploring include medicine, cellular biology, nanotechnology, weather forecasting, interactive cloud modeling,astrophysics, and computational fluid dynamics.
Bio.
David Ebert is an Associate Professor in the School of Electrical Engineering at Purdue University and received his Ph.D. from the Computer Science and Engineering Department at The Ohio State University in 1991. His research interests are scientific, medical, and information visualization, computer graphics, animation, and procedural techniques. Dr. Ebert performs research in volume rendering, illustrative visualization, minimally-immersive visualization, realistic rendering, procedural texturing, modeling, and animation, and modeling natural phenomena. Ebert has been very active in the graphics community, teaching courses, presenting papers, chairing the ACM SIGGRAPH 97 Sketches program, co-chairing the IEEE Visualization '98 and '99 Papers program, serving on the ACM SIGGRAPH Executive Committee and serving as Editor-in-Chief for IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics. Ebert is also editor and co-author of the seminal text on procedural techniques in computer graphics, Texturing and Modeling: A Procedural Approach, whose third edition was published in December 2003.

Host: Raghu Marchiraju