Research Interests

By David Whittinghill

Who I am

Professional programmer since 1997 Technical subject areas

Simulation Computer graphics/UI design Enterprise application architecture/development Database design IT/Web programming/design Multimedia (Web, CD-ROM)

Subject domains AI Pharmaceuticals Machine vision

Who I am

Master’s of Science - Purdue, West Lafayette 2003 Enterprise Application Development Computer Graphics

Doctor of Philosophy - Purdue, West Lafayette 2008 (expected) Physically-based rendering Virtual reality

Overview

Scientific Visualization Simulation and Modeling Physically-Based Rendering High Performance Computing Distributed Applications Agent-Based Simulation Virtual Reality Games Machine Vision User Interface Development

Dissertation

Modeling Visible-spectrum EM Radiation in a 3-Dimensional Space

Massa, 2005

And this is important…why?...

Dissertation Introduction

In 2004, President George W. Bush announced the US will go to Mars.

A one way trip to Mars will take 6 months.

How does one store a year’s worth of food and oxygen on a spacecraft?

Dissertation Introduction

You don’t.

Plants growing in ALS (Advanced Life Support) modules will convert carbon dioxide and provide food.

Prototyping the ALS modules is slow and expensive.

Instead, designs will be tested as a software simulation prior to construction.

Dissertation

Create a model of the light field that surrounds the plants in an ALS.

This will allow designers to make a better estimate of the amount of radiance existing at any spatial coordinate in the chamber.

Massa, 2005

Dissertation

Ray tracing

Full spectrum light modeling (near full: 2nm bins)

BRDF (Bi-directional Reflectance Distribution Function)

BTDF (Snell’s Law, ABM)

Stochastic Modeling (Monte Carlo)

ABM (Algorithmically Based Model)

Research Interests

HPC The transmission model used

could expand the variable count dramatically, HPC could help.

Virtual Reality Can be used to extend

application interface.

Distributed Applications Could extend use of application

to other facilities.

Research Interests

Dissertation touches on: Scientific Visualization Simulation and Modeling Physically-Based Rendering Agent-Based Simulation

Other Interests

Games and Ray Tracing Intel is pushing hard to give its extra cores something to do. Real-time ray tracing is the holy grail of rendering.

Machine Vision and UI Development There is interesting research uniting the two.

Games and VR This is underutilized territory. Commercial potential!

Shirley, 2006