Don Greenberg. Courtesy of SIGGRAPH ASIA 2008.

The inaugural SIGGRAPH Asia 2008 was formally opened on Tuesday, Dec 11, in true Singaporean style: with festive opening speeches by the Conference Chair YT Lee and by distinguished government representatives.

Highlight of the opening ceremony was featured speaker of the day Don Greenberg, Computer Graphics Pioneer and Director of Cornell University. Coming from an architecture background and using some of the earliest computer science to generate his first visualizations, Don was basically marking out the new territory of computer graphics. Yes, they did use punch cards back then to feed XYZ coordinates into the computer! Courage to try out new approaches and techniques, and find new fields to apply this technology, were the driving factors for him and his peers back then in the early days of computer graphics. Don noted that large parts of the new computer science research in the SIGGRAPH community are focused in animation, games and entertainment. While the quality increases, research topics have narrowed down to a few fields. Don calls us to have courage not to be risk adverse and venture into new areas of research and interdisciplinary practice, citing examples of applications in medical technology, earthquake and tectonic research, to ornithology where he researched the potential existence of an extinct bird species.

This curiosity for innovative uses of technology and to look beyond narrowing boarders shines through in Don's enthusiasm. Adequately the motto, which he thinks of every morning, is "happy is the man whose work is his hobby." - Animationblogspot.com

Dec 08

New faculty member Noah Snavely

The graphics faculty welcome new professor Noah Snavely, joining Cornell from the University of Washington where he worked on community photo collections. Oct 08

Milos Hasan wins NVidia 2008-2009 Fellowship

Milos Hasan has won a 2008-2009 NVIDIA Fellowship The NVIDIA Fellowship program provides funding to Ph.D. students who are researching topics that will lead to major advances in the graphics and digital media industry. April 08

Award for Adam Arbree's Eurographics Paper

Adam Arbree's Eurographics paper Single-pass Scalable Subsurface Rendering with Lightcuts awarded 2nd for Guenther Enderle Award for Best Student Paper. April 08

Kalachakra Mandala

Kavita Bala, with student Liz Popolo and monks from Ithaca's Namgyal Monastery, created a presentation of two- and three-dimensional models and animations to visualize the grand palace depicted in a Kalachakra mandala, a traditional sand image created by Buddhist Monks. The piece was displayed together with the mandala itself at the Johnson Art Museum. Sept 07

SCA best paper award

Doug James and his just-defended Ph.D. student Jernej Barbic (CMU) has received the best paper award at the 2007 ACM SIGGRAPH/Eurographics Symposium on Computer Animation for their paper Time-critical distributed contact for 6-DoF haptic rendering of adaptively sampled reduced deformable models. Aug 07

Marschner named EGSR co-chair

Steve Marschner has been named program co-chair, with Michael Wimmer of Technische Universität Wien, for the 2008 Eurographics Symposium on Rendering.Jul 07

Bala awarded NSF CAREER grant

The National Science Foundation(NSF) has awardedKavita Bala a Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) grant. This sum of $450,000 over the course of 5 years is titled "Scalable Rendering for VisualRealism in Scale-Complex Scenes".Feb 07