The confluence of virtual reality and artificial life, an emerging discipline that spans the computational and biological sciences, has
yielded synthetic worlds inhabited by realistic, artificial flora and fauna. Artificial animals are complex synthetic organisms that possess
functional biomechanical bodies, perceptual sensors, and brains with locomotion, perception, behavior, learning, and cognition centers.
Artificial humans and lower animals are of interest in computer graphics because they are self-animating graphical characters that can
dramatically advance the state of the art of production animation and interactive game technologies. More broadly, these biomimetic
autonomous agents in their realistic virtual worlds also foster deeper, computationally oriented insights into natural living systems.
Speaker Bio: Demetri Terzopoulos holds the Lucy and Henry Moses Professorship in Science at New York University and is Professor of
Computer Science and Mathematics at NYU's Courant Institute. He is also affiliated with the University of Toronto, where he is Professor
of Computer Science and Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering. He graduated from McGill University and received the PhD
degree (EECS) from MIT in 1984. His published work comprises hundreds of research papers and several volumes, primarily in computer
graphics, computer vision, medical imaging, computer-aided design, and artificial intelligence/life. A Fellow of the IEEE, Professor
Terzopoulos has been a Killam Fellow of the Canada Council for the Arts, a Steacie Fellow of the Natural Sciences and Engineering
Research Council of Canada, a Fellow of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research and a Fellow at UCLA's Institute for Pure and
Applied Mathematics. His many honors include computer graphics awards from Ars Electronica, NICOGRAPH, Computers and Graphics, and the
International Digital Media Foundation. He is co-chair of the 2005 ACM SIGGRAPH/Eurographics Symposium on
Computer Animation. Professor Terzopoulos is a member of the European Academy of Sciences.
For some niche applications such as large-scale data visualization, parallel software ray tracers are already much faster than the most
optimized GPU implementations. However, GPU programs are the only viable choice for most interactive applications. There are three
clear possibilities for the future of graphics on the desktop. First is a continuation of z-buffer based GPUs. Second is an emergence of
interactive ray tracing running on multicore CPUs. Third is ray tracing using custom hardware (ASIC). This talk examines trends in
hardware and application data and argues that ray tracing using custom hardware is the likely winner, and outlines the research problems that
will need to be overcome for such an outcome.
Speaker Bio: Peter Shirley is an associate professor in the School of Computing at the University of Utah. He has a B.A. in physics from
Reed College and a Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He spent four years as an assistant
professor at Indiana University and two years as a visiting assistant professor at the Cornell Program of Computer Graphics before moving to
Utah. His professional interests include interactive and realistic rendering, statistical computing, visualization, and immersive
environments.