Visualizing the Future of Computing

Estimated reading time: 6 minutes

Day two of KAUST RC-VC opened with a keynote lecture by Kavita Bala, professor in computer science, Cornell University and editor-in-chief of Transactions on Graphics (TOG). Bala’s Lightcuts research is the core production rendering engine in Autodesk's cloud renderer; her research on instance recognition is the core technology of GrokStyle's visual search engine, and her work on 3-D mandalas was featured at the Rubin Museum of Art in New York.

“We are drowning in images. Everyone has a cell phone and is attempting to capture the world. Wouldn't it be great to capture these real-world images and use them to better understand the world around us? I love problems that I don't understand—that's what research is all about,” she said.

In her keynote entitled “Materials in the Wild,” she spoke about how in our daily lives we are brought into contact with a wealth of materials that contribute to both the utility and aesthetics of our environment. Bala also described the differences between human and machine perception of materials and their appearance.

“When I talk about the 'wild' I'm not talking about the jungle—I'm talking about studies outside of the laboratory in a real-world environment. One of the objectives when we do this kind of modelling is to make the virtual representation of an item(s) indistinguishable from the real item(s)," Bala said.

"A lot of effort has gone into computer technology and material recognition. We trained our program to realize the object coming in and classify it accordingly. Through deep feature interpolation, we can produce a realistic interpretation of an image in three minutes," she continued. "Humans are good at disambiguating; we can recognize an object, but can the computer system recognize it?” 

‘Some materials remain challenging'

During the afternoon sessions, Roland Ruiters, a senior researcher with Autodesk, discussed the data-driven interpolation of optical properties. His talk was based on his work during his postdoctoral studies at the Institute of Computer Science II at the University of Bonn. 

“One of the challenges of the data-driven approach is that you have to take a lot of measurements. Editing can also be difficult due to the high complexity of the data sets —measurements are also costly. We would like to create novel materials that can be used at a different date,” Ruiters said. 

“We interpolate neighborhoods instead of whole images. Through our work, we create interpolated materials. Data-driven material representations can be used to get high-quality renderings for a wide range of materials. However, some materials remain challenging—there are large data sizes and long computation times and we need more intuitive user interfaces,” he concluded. 

A high-caliber conference

The third and final day of the conference was a mix of presentations, industrial symposiums and an open house at the VCC. The open house, which was sponsored by the KAUST Industry Collaboration Program (KICP), featured demonstrations and exhibitions from the VCC, the KAUST Visualization Lab and local industry partners. 

"We were really excited to host this research conference. Our students, faculty and staff benefited from many fruitful discussions with the invited participants from academia and industry. We are particularly happy about the high caliber of external researchers who attended the conference, and we believe the conference will be a starting point for productive collaborations in the future," said Peter Wonka, associate director of the VCC.

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