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Welcome to the on-line version of the UNC dissertation proposal collection. The purpose of this collection is to provide examples of proposals for those of you who are thinking of writing a proposal of your own. I hope that this on-line collection proves to be more difficult to misplace than the physical collection that periodically disappears.

If you are preparing to write a proposal you should make a point of reading the excellent document The Path to the Ph.D., written by James Coggins. It includes advice about selecting a topic, preparing a proposal, taking your oral exam and finishing your dissertation. It also includes accounts by many people about the process that each of them went through to find a thesis topic.

Adding to the Collection

This collection of proposals becomes more useful with each new proposal that is added. If you have an accepted proposal, please help by including it in this collection. You may notice that the bulk of the proposals currently in this collection are in the area of computer graphics. This is an artifact of me knowing more computer graphics folks to pester for their proposals. Add your non-graphics proposal to the collection and help remedy this imbalance!

There are only two requirements for a UNC proposal to be added to this collection. The first requirement is that your proposal must be completely approved by your committee. If we adhere to this, then each proposal in the collection serves as an example of a document that five faculty members have signed off on. The second requirement is that you supply, as best you can, exactly the document that your committee approved. While reading over my own proposal I winced at a few of the things that I had written. I resisted the temptation to change the document, however, because this collection should truely reflect what an accepted thesis proposal looks like.

Note that there is no requirement that the author has finished his/her Ph.D. Several of the proposals in the collection were written by people who, as of this writing, are still working on their dissertation. This is fine!

I encourage people to submit their proposals in any form they wish. Perhaps the most useful forms at the present are Postscript and HTML, but this may not always be so.

Greg Coombe has generously provided LaTeX thesis style files, which, he says, conform to the 2004-2005 stlye requirements.

Many thanks to everyone who contributed to this collection!

• Greg Coombe, "Incremental Construction of Surface Light Fields" in PDF.
• Karl Hillesland, "Image-Based Modelling Using Nonlinear Function Fitting on a Stream Architecture" in PDF.
• Martin Isenburg, "Compressing, Streaming, and Processing of Large Polygon Meshes" in PDF.
• Ajith Mascarenhas, "A Topological Framework for Visualizing Time-varying Volumetric Datasets" in PDF.
• Josh Steinhurst, "Practical Photon Mapping in Hardware" in PDF.
• Ronald Azuma, "Predictive Tracking for Head-Mounted Displays," in Postscript
• Mike Bajura, "Virtual Reality Meets Computer Vision," in Postscript
• David Ellsworth, "Polygon Rendering for Interactive Scientific Visualization on Multicomputers," in Postscript
• Richard Holloway, "A Systems-Engineering Study of the Registration Errors in a Virtual-Environment System for Cranio-Facial Surgery Planning," in Postscript
• Victoria Interrante, "Uses of Shading Techniques, Artistic Devices and Interaction to Improve the Visual Understanding of Multiple Interpenetrating Volume Data Sets," in Postscript
• Mark Mine, "Modeling From Within: A Proposal for the Investigation of Modeling Within the Immersive Environment" in Postscript
• Steve Molnar, "High-Speed Rendering using Scan-Line Image Composition," in Postscript
• Carl Mueller, "High-Performance Rendering via the Sort-First Architecture," in Postscript
• Ulrich Neumann, "Direct Volume Rendering on Multicomputers," in Postscript
• Marc Olano, "Programmability in an Interactive Graphics Pipeline," in Postscript
• Krish Ponamgi, "Collision Detection for Interactive Environments and Simulations," in Postscript
• Russell Taylor, "Nanomanipulator Proposal," in Postscript
• Greg Turk, "Generating Textures on Arbitrary Surfaces," in HTML and Postscript
• Terry Yoo, "Statistical Control of Nonlinear Diffusion," in Postscript

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