Interviews
Three new interviews are now available:
– DSOGaming in English,
– SG.hu in Hungarian,
– PC Games Hardware in German,
Check them out!
Posts
KÉPAF 2015
Just got back from KÉPAF 2015, a domestic computer vision and shape recognition conference. We had a great time with an electronic poster session and some great outdoor events involving all kinds of horseback riding. Thank you!
LuxRender at the Oscars!
Some footage made with LuxRender was shown during the Academy Awards. I have to admit that I reserved this Oscar-award image to posts involving any prizes and awards, and now there you go! 🙂 I’m so proud!
Separable Subsurface Scattering headlined
Our paper, Separable Subsurface Scattering seems to enjoy quite a bit of publicity from all over the world:
– Kotaku (EN),
– DSOGaming (EN),
– EurekAlert! (EN),
– Geeks3D (EN),
– Scientific Computing (EN),
– All of Nothing (EN),
– PC Games Hardware (DE),
– Game Zone (DE),
– Game Contrast (DE),
– Medizin & Technik (DE),
– Area Games (DE),
– TU Wien Press (DE),
– TU Austria (DE),
– Nickles (DE),
– Updatemi (DE),
– hi!tech (DE),
– Doope! (JP),
– Gamer Sky (CN),
– Huanqiu (CN),
– XXKCW (CN),
– Junmii (CN),
– Youxizh (CN),
– 3DM Game (CN),
– Danji 100 (AF),
– Gametech (RU),
– Shazoo (RU),
– BME-VIK (HU),
– index (HU) – headlined
There also seems to be a bit of buzz on twitter (mirror). I am delighted over the fact that so many people enjoy the beauty in the work we all love so much – the thing I want to do every single day of my life. Let me know if you see more!
Happy 2015!
I wish you a Happy New Year for 2015, preferably one that is rich in scientific discoveries, joy and personal growth (I’m on the right)!
Pixel Vienna 9
I recently had the chance to hold a talk at the Austrian Academy of Sciences for the Pixel Vienna 9 conference. One rarely has the chance to speak to such a great audience at such a wonderful venue. Here’s the applause at the very end of the talk. Thank you! 🙂
Ps: this, alongside with the recent talk of Fields medalist Cédric Villani is a good example of the vibrant scientific atmosphere of nowadays in Vienna that I love so much.
And the Sci-Tech award goes to…
Eric Veach, Matt Pharr, Greg Humphreys and Pat Hanrahan! You can watch their speeches here and here.
One could hardly overestimate the usefulness of their work. Even in the fast-moving field of rendering, Eric’s methods have been prevalent for more than one and a half decade now. In this field, we usually borrow techniques from theoretical mathematics and physics after sculpting them here and there to fit a specialized, practical application. It is commonplace that an engineer takes a technique from a mathematician to solve a practical problem, but it’s quite rare that an engineer can give back something to the mathematician. With the theory of Multiple Importance Sampling, Eric Veach made such an example, which I have found so far unprecendented. That is, among many others, indeed an inspiring achievement.
Furthermore, with the pbrt book of Matt Pharr and Greg Humphreys, we finally have an intuitive, all-encompassing resource for global illumination rendering. It’s great to see these people getting proper recognition for their achievements!
On peer review and paper preprint dissemination
I have recently come across two great pieces:
Professor Larry Wasserman and Walter Noll suggests a simple two-tier publishing system.
CERN physicists show statistics on the viability of arXiv in High Energy Physics (HEP) research, where they found the following:
- as of 2008, more than 95% of the peer-reviewed HEP journal articles are also published on the arXiv,
- the highest impact factor articles are both submitted to a journal and published on arXiv,
- articles that are submitted to arXiv before review obtain 20% of their first 2-year citation count by the time the journal article is accepted, and they also enjoy more than five times as many citations during this 2-year period,
- scientists read the arXiv more often than journal websites.
Physicists have been doing this for more than two decades now. If we are to improve our publishing system in computer graphics research, this is definitely a promising direction. Why don’t we?
Image-free computer graphics
Eugene d’Eon, one of the most influential and prolific authors in subsurface light transport research states an indeed very interesting and thought-provoking thought in his review of the Photon Beam Diffusion paper:
“It seems unclear to me that graphics papers like this one need images anymore. Carefully presented plots do much more to convince the reader of the accuracy of the proposed transport theory approximations. Showing selected results where a half-space searchlight solution is applied approximately to curved geometry, while pretty, does little to convince the reader of the method’s overall robustness.”
Just keep it nice and mathematical: if you have the plots of the convolution kernel you are using for rendering images, that is basically all you need to show – for rendered images, one can find an angle and a lighting setup where any possible algorithm can come out on top. If we wish to call computer graphics research scientific, it is definitely an argument that I find worthy of some discussion.