User:Csilva
Contact Information
Claudio T. Silva 50 S. Central Campus Dr. RM 3190 School of Computing University of Utah Salt Lake City, UT 84112 801-587-7588 (office phone)
General Information
I am an Associate Professor of Computer Science at the University of Utah, and a faculty member of the SCI Institute.
Upon arriving at Utah, I started the Visualization and Geometric Computing (VGC) group that at any given time includes a number of post-doc, graduate, and undergraduate students. We often also have both short and long-term visitors in our lab.
I received a B.S. in mathematics from the Federal University of Ceara (Brazil), M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science from the State University of New York at Stony Brook. Right after graduation I was a post-doc in the applied mathematics & statistics department at Stony Brook.
I spent several years in industry before becoming a full-time faculty member. During this time, I had the opportunity to be officially or un-officially associated with the following great institutions: IBM, AT&T, Sandia, LLNL, Stony Brook, OGI, and Princeton.
Courses
CP SC 4960 (Spring 2007) - Programming Challenges
CP SC 7940 (Spring 2007) - Scientific Visualization and Geometric Computing Seminar
CP SC 6962 (Fall 2006) - Algorithms
CP SC 4960 (Spring 2006) - Programming Challenges
CP SC 7960 (Spring 2006) - Geometry Processing
CP SC 6962 (Fall 2005) - Algorithms
CP SC 7936 (Fall 2005) - Graphics Seminar
Projects
Research Interests
My research focuses on Computer Graphics, Scientific Visualization, Applied Computational Geometry, and High-Performance Computing. Recent (and ongoing) projects concentrate in the following topics: Point-Based Modeling and Rendering, Scalable Displays, Large-Scale 3D Scanning, Visibility Algorithms Unstructured Volumetric Grids, Out-Of-Core Algorithms for Scientific Visualization, Surface and Volume Simplification, Parallel Rendering.
Current Students and Postdocs
Erik Anderson, PhD student
Steve Callahan, PhD candidate (ABD); MS thesis, May 2005
Linh Ha, PhD student
Tilo Ochotta, visiting PhD student
Emanuele Santos, PhD student
Carlos Eduardo Scheidegger, PhD student
John Schreiner, PhD candidate (ABD)
Nathan Smith, Undergraduate student
Huy T. Vo, PhD student
Hao Wang, Undergraduate student
Past Students and Postdocs
Evan Anderson, Undergraduate student @ Utah (08-12/2004)
Louis Bavoil, MS student, defended 12/2006 @ Utah; MS thesis; engineer at NVIDIA
Wagner T. Correa, Ph.D. student, graduated 12/2003 @ Princeton; PhD thesis; scientist at IBM Research
Ricardo Farias, Ph.D. student, graduated 06/2001 @ SUNY-Stony Brook; PhD thesis; professor at UFRJ-Brazil.
Shachar Fleishman, Post-doc @ Utah (03/2004-11/2005), research intern @ AT&T (2000-1)
Walter Herrera-Jimenez, Graduate student @ OGI (2003)
Sinesio Pesco, Post-doc @ OGI/Utah (03/2003-12/2004); professor at PUC-Rio.
Lourena Rocha, Research intern, OGI (03-11/2003)
Dirce Uesu, Post-doc @ OGI/Utah (03/2003-12/2004)
Wayne Tyler, Undergraduate student @ Utah.
Recent Collaborators
Joao Comba, UFRGS-Brazil
Daniel Cohen-Or, Tel Aviv
Pat Crossno, Sandia
Juliana Freire, Utah
James T. Klosowski, IBM
Joe Mitchell, SUNY-Stony Brook
Dan Laney, LLNL
Peter Lindstrom, LLNL
Valerio Pascucci, LLNL
Peter Shirley, Utah
Publications
Incomplete list on Google Scholar
Tutorials
High-Performance Visualization of Large and Complex Scientific Datasets
Out-Of-Core Algorithms for Scientific Visualization and Computer Graphics
Visibility, problems, techniques and applications
Rendering and Visualization in Affordable Parallel Environments
Patents
Software (source code)
http://afront.sourceforge.net, by Schreiner, Scheidegger, Fleishman and others.
http://havs.sourceforge.net, implementation of the Hardware-Assisted Visibility Sorting (HAVS) algorithm for rendering unstructured grids, by Callahan, Ikits, and others. Note that there is also a version of the HAVS algorithm implemented in VTK: vtkHAVSVolumeMapper.html.
GPU-based ray caster for Unstructured Meshes, by Bernardon and Comba.
TetMesh Comparator (tmc), for measuring errors between two tet meshes, by Louis Bavoil.
GTB: Graphics Toolbox, includes implementation of Correa's PhD thesis (in particular, iWalk)
GcTin, Greedy-Cuts terrain triangulation.
ZSWEEP, implementation by R. Farias of the ZSWEEP algorithm. Note that Kitware has implemented ZSWEEP in the most recent version of VTK. Here is a link to the class hierarchy: vtkUnstructuredGridVolumeZSweepMapper. I have not tested their implementation against the original one, but this one is certainly easier to use, since it is fully integrated into both VTK and Paraview. I have been told this is the preferred way to generate high-quality images of unstructured grids in VTK.
Raytrace, Unstructured-grid ray tracer, by Bunyk. This has also been implemented into VTK, see vtkUnstructuredGridBunykRayCastFunction
Here is a sample unstructured grid dataset: spx.off
Source code of Wylie et al's vertex program for rendering a tetrahedron. Brian asked me to post this for him, since he did not have a webpage. See their paper at VolVis 2002 for details.
oocsx.m, partial Mathematica implementation of the OoCSx algorithm.
Sponsors
Our research is (or has been) funded by the Department of Energy under the SciDAC program (SDM and VACET projects), Sandia National Laboratories, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, the National Science Foundation (grants CCF-0401498, EIA-0323604, OISE-0405402, IIS-0513692, CCF-0528201, OCE-0424602), IBM Faculty Awards (2005 and 2006), and a University of Utah Seed Grant.