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

VisTrails

afront

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</a>, 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

Nearly complete list

Incomplete list from DBLP

Incomplete list on Google Scholar

Tutorials

<a href="http://www.sci.utah.edu/~csilva/papers/sc2002-m9.pdf">High-Performance Visualization of Large and Complex Scientific Datasets</a>
<a href="http://www.sci.utah.edu/~csilva/papers/vis2002-tutorial4.pdf">Out-Of-Core Algorithms for Scientific Visualization and Computer Graphics</a>
<a href="http://www.sci.utah.edu/~csilva/papers/course30.pdf">Visibility, problems, techniques and applications</a>
<a href="http://www.gris.uni-tuebingen.de/~bartz/tutorials">Rendering and Visualization in Affordable Parallel Environments</a>

Patents

<a href="http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sect2=HITOFF&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsearch-adv.htm&r=0&f=S&l=50&d=PTXT&RS=%28%28%28IN%2Fsilva+AND+IN%2Fclaudio%29+AND+AN%2FInternational%29+OR+%28%28%28IN%2Fclaudio+AND+IN%2Fsilva%29+AND+IN%2Fcorrea%29+AND+IN%2Fwagner%29%29&Refine=Refine+Search&Refine=Refine+Search&Query=+%28IN%2Fsilva+AND+IN%2Fclaudio+AND+%28AN%2FInternational%29%29+OR+%28in%2Fclaudio+AND+in%2Fsilva+AND+in%2Fcorrea+AND+in%2Fwagner%29+OR+%28in%2Fclaudio+AND+in%2Fsilva+AND+in%2Fbin+AND+in%2Fwei%29">The official USPTO list.</a> (eight patents)

Software (source code)

<a href="http://www.vistrails.org">www.vistrails.org</a>

<a href="http://afront.sourceforge.net">afront.sourceforge.net</a>, by Schreiner, Scheidegger, Fleishman and others.

<a href="http://havs.sourceforge.net">havs.sourceforge.net</a>, 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: <a href="http://www.vtk.org/doc/nightly/html/classvtkHAVSVolumeMapper.html">vtkHAVSVolumeMapper.html</a>.)

<a href="software/gpu_volume_ray_casting.zip">GPU-based ray caster for Unstructured Meshes</a>, by Bernardon and Comba

<a href="http://www.sci.utah.edu/~bavoil/research/tetsimp/tmc">TetMesh Comparator (tmc)</a>, for measuring errors between two tet meshes, by Louis Bavoil

<a href="https://sourceforge.net/projects/gtb">GTB: Graphics Toolbox</a>, includes implementation of Correa's PhD thesis (in particular, iWalk)

<a href="software/gctin.tar.gz">GcTin</a>, Greedy-Cuts terrain triangulation

<a href="software/zsweep.zip">ZSWEEP</a>, implementation by R. Farias of the ZSWEEP algorithm. (Note that Kitware has implemented ZSWEEP in the most recent version of <a href="http://www.vtk.org">VTK</a>. Here is a link to the class hierarchy: <a href="http://www.vtk.org/doc/nightly/html/classvtkUnstructuredGridVolumeZSweepMapper.html">vtkUnstructuredGridVolumeZSweepMapper</a>. 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.)

<a href="software/raytrace.tar.gz">Raytrace</a>, Unstructured-grid ray tracer, by Bunyk. (This has also been implemented into VTK, see <a href="http://vtk.org/doc/nightly/html/classvtkUnstructuredGridBunykRayCastFunction.html">vtkUnstructuredGridBunykRayCastFunction</a>.)
<a href="data/spx.off">spx.off</a> (sample dataset)

<a href="software/wylie-et-al-code.tar.gz">Source code</a> of Wylie et al's vertex program for rendering a tetrahedron
(See their paper at VolVis 2002 for details.)

<a href="software/oocsx.m">oocsx.m</a>, partial Mathematica implementation of the OoCSx algorithm