CGL Meeting Agenda

Wednesday, April 22, 1998

Location:
DC 1304
Time:
1:30
Chair:
Kirk Haller

1. Adoption of the Agenda - additions or deletions

2. Coffee Hour

Coffee hour this week:
Blair Conrad
Coffee hour next week:

3. Next meeting

Date:
Wednesday, April 29, 1998
Location:
DC 1304
Time:
1:30
Chair:
Rob Kroeger
Technical presentation:
Glen Evans

4. Forthcoming

Chairs:
  1. Celine Latulipe (May 6th)
  2. Nathan Litke (May 13th)
  3. Marryat Ma (May 20th)
Tech Presenters:
  1. Patrick Gilhuly (May 6th)
  2. Eric Hall (May 13th)
  3. Kirk Haller (May 20th)

5. Technical Presentations

Presenter:
Itai Danan
Title: VisualAge: A New Era for Programming
 
Abstract: This short presentation introduces visual programming as a tool to enhance programmer's productivity without compromising the power and flexibility of traditional programming. This presentation also explains how visual composition works and what are the advantages and disadvantages it gives to programmers.

6. General Discussion Items

7. Action List

8. Director's Meeting

9. Seminars

DEPARTMENT OF COMPUTER SCIENCE
UNIVERSITY OF WATERLOO
SEMINAR ACTIVITIES


Computer Science Seminar


               - Monday, April 27, 1998


Dr.  Marek  Teichmann, MIT Computer Graphics Group will
speak on "Creating and Animating Polygonal Models''

ROOM:          Davis Centre Room DC1304

TIME:          10:30 a.m. - 11:30 a.m.

ABSTRACT

Creating  articulated geometric models is a common task
in   animation  systems.   With  the  advent  of  laser
scanners,  it  is  now  practical  to  obtain polygonal
models  of  actual  objects.   I  will  describe  a new
algorithm  for  the  reconstruction of polygonal meshes
from point sets with normal information at each point.

Then, starting from a 3D polygonal mesh representing an
object  to  be animated, a common, but tedious approach
is  to  manually  design a skeleton, and the binding to
couple model motions to those of the skeleton.

I  will also present a simple method for automating the
above tasks.  Given a 3D polygonal mesh representing an
object,  an  approximation to the mesh's medial axis is
efficiently  computed using a 3D Voronoi diagram of the
mesh  vertices, and connectivity information within the
mesh.   Selected  nodes of the resulting tree structure
are  then interpreted as joints of an I-K skeleton, and
the  chains  connecting  them  as  its links.  A spring
network  is  then generated to bind the I-K skeleton to
the  object  boundary,  so  that  skeletal motions will
affect  the  boundary in a reasonable way, as specified
by the animator.

DEPARTMENT OF COMPUTER SCIENCE
UNIVERSITY OF WATERLOO
SEMINAR ACTIVITIES

Master's Thesis Presentation


          - Tuesday, April 28, 1998


Tali  Zvi,  Graduate  Student,  Department  of Computer
Science,   University   of   Waterloo,  will  speak  on
``Visualization   Methods   for   Flow   in   Fractured
Domains''.

ROOM:          Davis Centre Room DC1304

TIME:          11:30 a.m. - 12:30 p.m. [note time change]

ABSTRACT:

Recently,   scientific   visualization  has  become  an
important  tool  used  in  research  to investigate and
understand physical phenomena.  Particle advection is a
common   technique   used  in  flow  visualization  and
although it is used to visualize various types of flow,
little  work  has  been  done  on  the  use of particle
advection for flow in fractured domains. Most advection
algorithms  use  mean  values  in a vector field, which
results  in  an inaccurate and incomplete visualization
of the flow.

In this work  a  particle  advection  algorithm  is
described,   which   can   be   effectively   used   in
visualization  of  flow  in  fractured domains.  Unlike
existing algorithms, flow trends can be visualized with
this   algorithm   using   a  probability  distribution
function.  Incoming and outgoing flows may be specified
to  account  for fluid sources and sinks, respectively.
In   addition,  simultaneous  visualization  of  scalar
fields  and multiple vector fields is possible. Various
mapping  schemes  were  tested  to  allow  simultaneous
representation  of several characteristics of the flow.
The  results  of  this research are presented both on a
CD-ROM and on the World Wide Web.


DEPARTMENT OF COMPUTER SCIENCE
UNIVERSITY OF WATERLOO
SEMINAR ACTIVITIES

Master's Essay Presentation
          -Tuesday, April 28, 1998

Alex  Qian,  graduate  student, Dept. Comp. Sci., Univ.
Waterloo,  will  speak  on  ``A  Review of IP Multicast
Protocols''.

TIME:                1:30-2:30 p.m.

ROOM:                DC 1331

ABSTRACT

Multicast  is the underlying technology for multi-party
applications.    With   the   increasing   demand   for
multimedia  applications such as video-conferencing and
network   games,  multicast  has  become  an  important
service.  IP  multicast  protocols  have  the  goal  of
achieving  efficient  and  scalable  mutlicasting. Many
multicast  protocols exist, each with its own strengths
and  weaknesses.  I  will  look  at  several  multicast
protocols and comment on their differences.

10. Lab Cleanup