James Thigpen

This semester I am taking a Graduate Colloquium Class which consists of attending various seminars presented through the department and writing a short report about each one. It’s designed to give students an idea of what is going on in the research community. I have decided to include my reports in on this blog, as someone may be interested in them.

Presentation on the Computing Research Association given at the University of Houston Computer Science Department

Presenter:
Dr. Andrew Bernat
Executive Director
Computing Research Association
10/24/2007

Dr. Andrew Bernat presented on the work the Computer Research Association (CRA) performs to advance the status of computing education and research. The Computing Research Association aims to benefit those in the computing research fields which include Computer Science, Computer Engineering, and Information Technology. Their efforts are specifically targeted towards lobbying to influence governmental policy with respect to funding, providing resources which aid in fostering communities within the computing research field, and encouraging and facilitating the development of “human resources” in the form of educated persons. They employ various channels such as online and print newsletters, career postings, and blogs in order to disseminate information about their efforts and successes.

In order to further the community building aspect of their mission, the CRA hosts a biennial conference of department chairs from Ph.D. granting institutions in North America. They also have a series of programs and conferences for the advancement of women and minorities in computing research. In North America there is a great deal of disparity between the numbers of men and women enrolled in computing education programs.

Dr. Bernat also presented some interesting data concerning the trends related towards the number of computer science degrees produced and degrees declared nationwide. There was a significant decrease in the number of students declaring a computer science major after the dot-com bubble burst; however, that number appears to have either reached a plateau or increased slightly according to the latest data.

The CRA’s current efforts to influence governmental policy with respect to funding of computing research were also discussed. He presented compelling evidence in the form of brief case studies of research projects becoming billion-dollar industries that an overwhelming portion of economic growth in recent years is due directly to the growth of information technology industries.

Any attempt to build community and garner governmental support for computing research initiatives will prove to be of great benefit to the computing community as a whole. However, it is possible to envision some of their programs being rather controversial as they ultimately hope to fundamentally change the landscape of computing research.

Below are some related comments which would not fit the orignal report.

Many political factors influence the success and failure of CRA’s initiatives, and Dr. Bernat discussed the significant role they had in garnering acceptance for the American Competitiveness Initiative, an initiative designed to guarantee the United States’ competitive abilities in the future which included a hefty increase in research funding over ten years. Although many factors played their part in garnering more money for research and education programs, the CRA was able to obtain data which helped to create a negative PR storm with respect to funding of research.

Programs which I found particularly interesting are the CRA-W and the CDC which aim to promote the interests of women and minorities respectively in the computing disciplines.

This semester I am taking a Graduate Colloquium Class which consists of attending various seminars presented through the department and writing a short report about each one. It’s designed to give students an idea of what is going on in the research community. I have decided to include my reports in on this blog, as someone may be interested in them.

Interactive Physically Based Simulation
Dr. John Keyser
Associate Professor
Department of Computer Science
Texas A&M University
10/01/2007

Dr. Keyser presented his work on Interactive Physically Based Simulations. The goal of his work is to produce real-time simulations which are not physically accurate but are good enough estimates to be visually believable.

Dr. Keyser discussed the differences between a real-time estimation and a physically accurate simulation in the context of applications. A training simulator for example may require real-time simulation whereas aerospace simulations require physical accuracy. An aerodynamics engineer will not be overly concerned as to whether or not his simulation is real-time if the results are completely wrong even if they are visually believable. His work also has applicability in the computer graphics domain, as it is beneficial for an artist to control scriptable elements. Scriptable elements are much easier to control than initial condition simulations. It’s difficult to understand how changes in initial conditions will affect the end result, so a physically accurate simulation is not of much use to an artist creating graphics for a movie.

Real-time simulation is achieved through simplification of the underlying simulation models, and through a careful decoupling of the various models. A particular simulation may be represented as several models in the computer in order to simulate the various effects taking place. Knowing which model depends on which other models, it is possible to minimize inter-model communication as time progresses. Real-time for his case is defined as a usable “action:response” cycle frequency with the simulation system.

Dr. Keyser showed various examples of his work including a fire simulation which included fuel concentration, smoke, and deformation of objects (such as matches). He also displayed a stunning water simulation which, in certain scenarios, was relatively close to a physically correct simulation. It used wave particles to simulate the waves spreading across the surface which was then rendered using a grid based approach. The use of a particle based system allowed hardware acceleration and provided nice looking results and a real-time interaction rate when using up to 300,000 particles simultaneously.