Toshiya
Hachisuka,
Department
of
Creative
Informatics
University
of
Tokyo
It is easy to appreciate the beauty of computer-generated images in movies and advertisements today. It is, however, not immediately obvious that generation of such visually appealing images is based on equally (but scientifically) appealing numerical algorithms and theories. For example, photorealistic images are based on accurate simulation of light transport, which can be formulated as a recursive integral equation with no trivial analytical solution. One of the core problems in computer graphics is to solve this equation as efficiently and accurately as possible.
In this talk, I will explain the body of our work which led to a unification of various algorithms for light transport simulation. Our study of mathematical connections among the different classes of the algorithms resulted in some of the most robust light transport simulation algorithms we have today. I will discuss how our insights from light transport simulation are applicable to more general problems in numerical analysis, and how further research will potentially lead to better understandings of both light transport simulation and numerical analysis.
Bio: Toshiya Hachisuka is currently an Associate Professor at the University of Tokyo where he is leading his own research group on computer graphics. Before coming to the University of Tokyo, he had been an Assistant Professor at Aarhus University from 2011 to 2014.
He received a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of California at San Diego in 2011 and a B.Eng. from the University of Tokyo in 2006. His research interests include light transport simulation, computational statistics, numerical analysis, and physically-based animation. He has a number of publications spanning across these topics in the area of computer graphics.