Smart tools for photos and 3D models manipulation

Ariel Shamir - Efi Arazi school of Computer Science, The Interdisciplinary Center, Herzliya

Sept. 27, 2013, 1 p.m. - Sept. 27, 2013, 2 p.m.

MC103


Powerful applications such as PhotoShop for images, AutoCad and Maya for 3D models, allow manipulating and fabricating digital objects in unimaginable ways. However, these tools are sophisticated and often very difficult to use. One of the challenges in graphics and design today is to create simpler tools that allow even novice users to use computers more naturally for photographs and 3D objects manipulations. In this talk I will present several such efforts including sketch2photo, sketch2-3D and the recent 3-sweep technology (all joint works with students and colleagues). The key factor in all these works is utilizing humans specifically for semantic, high-level tasks that are very simple for them, and are still extremely difficult for machines, while utilizing the machine for tasks that are tedious or hard for humans. Ariel Shamir is an associate professor at the Efi Arazi school of Computer Science at the Interdisciplinary Center in Herzliya Israel. He received a B.Sc. and M.Sc. degrees in math and computer science Cum Laude from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, and a Ph.D. in computer science in 2000. He spent two years as a post-doctoral fellow at the computational visualization center at the University of Texas in Austin. In 2006 he held the position of visiting scientist at Mitsubishi Electric Research Labs in Cambridge MA. He has also had affiliations with Disney Research, Lawrence Livermore national laboratory, and a number of high-tech companies in Israel (Primesense, Sensomatix, Paieon medical, and more). His research interests include geometric modeling, computer graphics, visualization, and machine learning.