Date: May 4th (Friday), 2007
Time: 2:00 PM - 3:00PM
Location: Auditorium, LSU School of Design
Reception: 3:00 PM
Dr. Turner Whitted, Microsoft Research
Pioneer In Three-dimensional Computer Graphics
Bio:
As a manager and researcher at Microsoft Research, Turner Whitted has explored topics in
hardware devices, HCI, and computer graphics. He was a member of the computer science
faculty at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill from 1983 until 2001 as well
as a cofounder and director of Numerical Design Limited. Prior to that he was a member
of the technical staff in Bell Labs' computer systems research laboratory where he introduced
the notion of using recursive ray tracing to implement global illumination. He earned BSE and
MS degrees from Duke University and a PhD from North Carolina State University, all in
electrical engineering. In the past he has served on the editorial boards of IEEE Computer
Graphics and Applications and ACM Transactions on Graphics, and was papers chair for
SIGGRAPH 97. He is an ACM Fellow and a member of the National Academy of Engineering.
Abstract:
The re-introduction of programmability into graphics hardware has produced a tremendously
flexible imaging platform. At the same time, increases of processing speed relative to memory
speed have shifted the performance advantage from memory-intensive graphical models to
processor-intensive ones. The combination of these two trends has prompted designers of
real-time systems to move away from passive models and towards procedural representations
for shading, shape, and texture. This talk presents an overview of Microsoft Research's work
on new procedural representations and architectures. It also presents a challenge to the
established graphics pipeline and proposes alternatives more amenable to these procedural
representations.
All are welcome to attend.
