Illinois-Intel Parallelism Center (I2PC) Distinguished Speaker Series

Thursday May 10th, 4pm CDT, Room SC3405 

AvaScholar

                                        John Hart

                                  University of Illinois

Abstract:

AvaScholar is an I2PC Application framework designed to demonstrate
applications of scalable parallel programming for the task of
supporting remote instruction and education, ranging from academic
classes to industry seminars. With AvaScholar we seek to find future
technologies that will rely critically on improved computational
speeds that will require parallel programming, and support a testbed
of parallel applications we can use to motivate, test and demonstrate
our parallel programming tools from the I2PC SafeSpeed and Acrobatics
projects. AvaScholar consists of two components. The AvaScholar
Instructor focuses on real-time 3-D capture and reconstruction,
whereas the AvaScholar Client focuses on collecting demographics and
tracking the engagement of large numbers of remote participants. We
will examine the components of this system, demonstrate current
progress in parallel implementation and scalability, and discuss
current and future opportunities for leveraging I2PC parallel
programming tools for further performance gains.

Speaker's Bio:

John C. Hart is an Professor in the Department of Computer Science at
the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign where he studies computer
graphics and computational topology. Prof. Hart is a past
Editor-in-Chief of ACM Transactions on Graphics. He is a co-author of
"Real-Time Shading" and a contributing author for "Texturing and
Modeling: A Procedural Approach." He served from 1994-9 on the ACM
SIGGRAPH Executive Committee, and is an Executive Producer of the
documentary "The Story of Computer Graphics." Prof. Hart received his
B.S. from Aurora University in 1987, and an M.S. (1989) and Ph.D.
(1991) from the Electronic Visualization Laboratory at the University
of Illinois at Chicago. He interned with Alan Norton at the IBM T.J.
Watson Research Center in 1989 and with Pixel Machines at AT&T Bell
Labs in 1990. He was a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the EVL and
NCSA until 1992, and an Assistant then Associate Professor in the
School of EECS at Washington State University until 2000.
 

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I2PC seminars are held on Thursdays at 4pm Central Time in Room 3405 of the Siebel Center.

They are streamed live at this link:

* http://media.cs.illinois.edu/live/I2PClive.asx

Questions to the speaker for live response can be posted at:

* http://i2pc.cs.illinois.edu/chat

A complete list of seminars is available here:

* http://i2pc.cs.illinois.edu/seminars.html