Distinguished Speaker Series: Alla Sheffer (U of British Columbia)- Explainable Geometric Algorithms
Abstract: Supporting artists and designers creating 2D and 3D content requires solving a myriad geometric problems. In this talk I will focus on problems, which once well-understood can be solved using fully explainable (no AI inside) methods. I will include examples across a wide range of 2D and 3D geometry processing tasks, including clip art and 3D geometry reshaping, VR interfaces for shape modeling, 3D reconstruction from sketches, sketch consolidation, and real-time atlasing for texture space shading. The common thread in our approach to these problems is the formulation of the desired outcomes as the solution of discrete-continuous optimization problems followed by derivation of efficient, tailored optimization algorithms for solving them.
Speakers
Alla Sheffer
Alla Sheffer is a Professor of Computer Science at the University of British Columbia and a Scholar at Amazon Inc. She received her BSc (1991), MSc (1995), and PhD (2000) from Hebrew University, Jerusalem, Israel. She investigates algorithms for geometry processing, focusing on fabrication and computer graphics applications. She is particularly interested in leveraging connections between geometry and perception to enable users to create and manipulate geometric content, including garments and 3D printable artifacts. Prof. Sheffer regularly publishes at selective computer graphics venues and has co-authored over 50 papers published in ACM Transactions on Graphics, including numerous papers in SIGGRAPH and SIGGRAPH Asia proceedings. She holds 6 recent patents on methods for garment grading, sketch analysis, and hexahedral mesh generation. Sheffer is a Fellow of IEEE, a Fellow of ACM, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, a Fellow of Eurographics, and a Member of the SIGGRAPH Academy. She is the recipient of the 2018 Canadian Human Computer Communications Society Achievement Award; a UBC Killam Research Award; multiple faculty awards from Adobe, Google and IBM; an NSERC Discovery Accelerator award; and an Audi Production Award. She was the Technical Papers Committee Chair for SIGGRAPH’23 and co-chaired the program committees for Eurographics’18, 3DV’18, PG’19, SGP’06 and IEEE SMI’13. She has served on the editorial boards of ACM TOG, IEEE TVCG, Computer Graphics Forum, Graphical Models, Computers & Graphics, and CAGD.
