Posted Spring 1999
As part of its most recent Best Graduate Schools rankings, U.S. News and World Report awarded our department's computer graphics program the #1 ranking in the specialty category "Graphics: User Interaction." This represents a step up the ladder since the last time computer science programs were ranked in 1996; at that time UNC-Chapel Hill's computer graphics program tied for second place with Brown and Carnegie-Mellon.
In the computer science Ph.D. program overall rankings, the department tied for 21st place with three other schools: Columbia University, University of Massachusetts at Amherst, and University of Southern California.
Kevin Jeffay Named to Chaired Professorship
Posted Spring 1999
As of July 2000, associate professor Kevin Jeffay will be the S. S. Jones Distinguished Term Professor of Computer Science, a position which will last for 5 years. This professorship is named in honor of the late S. Shepard Jones (1909-1995), a former State Department employee and from 1955 until his retirement Burton Craige professor of political science at UNC-CH. The S. S. Jones professorship is one of the Margaret and Paul A. Johnston professorships, a series of chaired professorships in the College of Arts and Sciences that honors retired faculty members. The purpose of the professorships, which were established by Johnston's bequest in 1987, is to acknowledge excellence in research or creative activity and a demonstrated commitment to undergraduate or graduate education on the part of mid-career faculty.
UNC Computer Science Hosts Intel Visiting
Researcher
Sonja Jeter, a Senior Software Design Engineer at Intel Corporation in
Santa Clara, California, was in residence at the Department of Computer
Science from September 1998 through March 1999 on a six-month assignment
in a liaison position. Her hosts here at UNC were Ming Lin and Dinesh
Manocha.
As an Intel liaison at UNC, Jeter facilitated communication between UNC
computer science researchers and Intel's Microcomputer Graphics Labs
(MGL). She also assisted with technology sharing between the two
institutions in areas such as collision detection, occlusion culling,
3D sound, animation, and portals.
Jeter works with the MGL at Intel Corporation in the Parallel
Prototypes & Demos (PP&D) group, where she is a 3D graphics
programmer, artist, and web master. The PP&D team is involved in
research and development of scene management for parallel and
uniprocessor machines. The team also develops high-performance
computers based on Intel architectures. MGL's work is showcased
by Intel executives at many of their speaking engagements.
MGL research provides insight today into the next generation of graphics
technologies, and this helps Intel develop architectures that will
perform optimally with graphics applications.
Jeter holds a master's degree in computer science from the University
of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and bachelor's degrees in computer
science and electrical engineering from North Carolina State
University. She has worked at Intel for about 3 years.
Graduate School Honors Fellowship Winners
On February 25th 1999, the UNC-CH Graduate School held its first
Prestigious External Awards Recognition Dinner at the Carolina Club in
the Alumni Center. Graduate students representing more than 30
departments were recognized for having won external fellowships and
grants. Sixteen graduate students from the Department of Computer
Science were honored at the dinner, including Carl Erikson, who is
the current holder of the Intel Graduate Student Fellowship. Erikson
attended the dinner with his advisor, Dinesh Manocha. Dean of the
Graduate School Linda Dykstra, Provost Richard J. Richardson, and N.C.
Congressman David Price addressed the dinner attendees.
UNC Computer Science Faculty Spend Summer
at Intel
Dinesh Manocha, associate professor, and Ming C. Lin, assistant
professor, spent a portion of the summer of 1998 as visiting researchers at
Intel, hosted by Bob Liang. They interacted with several Intel
researchers and developed some collaborative research relationships.
Intel is also now in the process of licensing some technologies developed
at UNC, such as the RAPID interference detection system, V-COLLIDE
collision detection system, occlusion culling system based on
hierarchical occlusion maps, and a polygon simplification system based
on simplification culling.
Projects on which Lin and Manocha are collaborating with Intel
researchers are:
Carl Erikson Receives 1998-1999 Intel Graduate
Student Fellowship
Computer science graduate student
Carl Erikson has received the department's second Intel Graduate
Student Fellowship. This fellowship will enable Erikson to move
forward on his doctoral dissertation research, which focuses on a
subfield of computer graphics called polygonal simplification.
It has become increasingly common for users of computers to
want to visualize three-dimensional models or datasets and change his
or her viewpoint interactively, as if walking or flying around the
model in real time. Some models are so complex, however, that a
computer cannot render the different viewpoints quickly enough to make
the visualization experience interactive for the user. Polygonal
simplification is one technique used to accelerate the rendering
of complex three-dimensional models represented by polygons.
The basic idea of this method is to render objects that are far away
from the user using a coarse approximation while rendering objects
near the viewer using a detailed representation. For example, if
the viewer were located in a forest, the trees in close proximity to
the viewer would be rendered in full detail while the trees farther
away would be rendered much more simply with little detail. Since the
computer can render these simplified trees faster than the original
tree, it is able to draw the scene more quickly.
Bob Liang serves as Erikson's mentor at Intel, and Dinesh Manocha
is his dissertation advisor at UNC.
The first Intel Graduate Student Fellowhip, awarded in 1997-98, was
held by Mark Parris.
Dinesh Manocha Honored with a Hettleman Prize
Associate professor Dinesh
Manocha is one of three recent winners of a
1998 Philip and Ruth Hettleman Prize for Artistic and Scholarly
Achievement. The Hettleman Prize, founded by the late Philip
Hettleman, a New York investment broker and UNC-CH alumnus, recognizes
achievement by junior tenure-track faculty or recently tenured
faculty. Manocha, a computer science faculty member since 1992, works
in the areas of computer graphics and computational geometry. He has
won grants from various government and industrial sources and produced
journal articles, book chapters, software products, and videos.
Robotics simulation systems vendors are currently using an algorithm
developed by Manocha, and his work on topics such as collision detection
has been applied in Department of Defense laboratories.
"Dinesh is a superb researcher who has already accomplished much in a
very short time and shows no signs of slowing down," Dr. Stephen
Weiss, computer science department chairman, wrote in his nominating
letter.
Manocha, who earned his Ph.D. at the University of
California-Berkeley, has won honors including the Sloan Foundation
Fellowship, the Office of Naval Research Young Investigator Award, and
the National Science Foundation Career Award.
High School Students Try Out UNC's
nanoManipulator
Posted Spring 1999
Posted March 1999
Posted Fall 1998
Over the last few years, UNC has been developing technology for fast
collision detection. Some of the systems developed at UNC --
I-Collide, RAPID, and V-Collide -- are widely used and have been
licensed by a number of commercial vendors. Some of the most recent
research makes use of oriented bounding boxes (OBBs) for fast
collision detection. Manocha and Lin have interacted with the Folsom group
(including Basel Kayyali, Deep Buck, Jimmy Jian, and Vladimir
Pentkovoski) and assisted them in parallelizing the most important
routines in RAPID, a collision-detection library developed at UNC and
also the core of V-Collide. They also helped the members of this group
on key issues that affect run-time performance. They hoped to obtain
the SIMD code in return for the Katmai demos. After considering
various trade-offs and other design issues, they believe that the OBB
overlap test is the essential routine to "katmaize."
Lin and Manocha have had significant interaction with Ken Hilton at Gravity to port
V-Collide into the BugsRT demo (under the Gia project) for Katmai
launch next year. They plan to enhance this demo further by working
with Gravity to incorporate our new dynamic simplification culling
techniques as well as using the demo as a testbed for our future
research in rendering and simulating complex dynamic environments.
When graphics hardware alone is insufficient to render a complex
dynamic environment in real time, how can we attempt to simulate the
interactions among many moving entities in it as well? Much remains
to be investigated in addressing both geometric level of details
(G-LoD) and motion (simulation or behavior) level of details (M-LoD).
A unified framework that integrates both types of LoDs is the ultimate
goal. Driving applications include multi-user gaming, dynamic
simulation of multiple (100s or 1000s) agents, complex animation of
group behaviors, etc. To de-couple their interdependence and to
clearly lay out the important issues for M-LoD (which have not been
formally addressed in the literature), Manocha and Lin began studying some
of the issues with Feng Xie, Mike Shantz, and Baining Guo.
Lin and Manocha have had considerable interaction with Jonathan Sweedler, Samuel
Wong and Feng Xie on supporting occlusion culling and other multi-pass
graphics rendering algorithms on future Intel platforms. One of the
major bottlenecks in current chip-sets is the bandwidth from the CPU
to the graphics cards. This becomes a major issue when attempting to render
large models composed of hundreds of thousands of polygons. The
future processor may have hardware support for scan-conversion and
rasterization. Lin and Manocha have investigated many occlusion algorithms for
such processors. They have also provided Intel with an occlusion
culling system (based on Hierarchical Occlusion Map technology
developed at UNC). Sweedler, Wong, and Xie are currently
evaluating its performance.
Manocha and Lin believe the trend for future visual computing on PCs pushes for
seamless integration of multi-modal data, including video, images,
graphics, audio, text, and other information (financial data,
statistical patterns, etc.). This will include real and synthetic
data. UNC has been developing techniques for generating and
maintaining large synthetic models and displaying them interactively
on current graphics systems. Manocha and Lin have been interacting closely with
the Video group at Intel (mainly Boon-Lock and Minerva). Bob Liang
has suggested the idea of using video for UNC's walkthrough and
visualization technology. This idea has a lot of promise, and Manocha
and Lin plan to investigate further.
Posted Fall 1998
Through his research Erikson hopes to make several contributions:
1) to create a new method to generate simplified versions of a
polygonal object automatically, 2) to develop efficient methods to
render static 3D models by merging separate objects together, and
3) to extend this work to handle dynamic environments, in which
objects in the scene are changing position. The ultimate goal is to
visualize interactively a large dynamic environment consisting of many
moving parts through the use of polygonal simplication techniques
alone.
Posted September 1998
Posted June 1998
In June 1998, students in an advanced placement biology class at
Orange High School in Hillsborough, N.C., had the opportunity to use
UNC's nanoManipulator system for some hands-on learning. The
nanoManipulator is a unique system that combines virtual reality
technology with an atomic force microscope so that users have the
sensation of actually feeling and seeing molecules, viruses, and other
atomic-scale particles in real time.
Faculty and graduate students
from the computer science and physics department spent four days with
the classes teaching them how to use the nanoManipulator to see, feel,
probe, and modify Adeno viruses.
Computer science faculty Kevin Jeffay and Don Smith and their team had worked for months beforehand
to create a method for fast transmission of data from the atomic force
microscope, housed in the Department of Physics, over the Internet to
the high school. School of Education faculty member Gail Jones
surveyed the students before and after the experiments to measure
their learning. This project was also funded in part by a UNC
Chancellor's Award for Instructional Technology.
Last content review: 19 July 2001
Content managed by:
pubs@cs.unc.edu