Life off the (Cartesian) grid
We live in a "digital age". Much of the information we consume, experience, work with, and analyze exists in a digital, or sampled form. This includes music, photographs, games, but also business data as well as medical and scientific data. While the basics of sampling are usually taught and understood in one dimension, most of our data live in two, three, or many dimensions. The simplest way of extending one dimensional sampling to more dimensions (e.g. for photographs or medical 3D data) has been the Cartesian grid. The key to efficiently store and process data is the sampling pattern. In this talk I attempt to convince you, that alternatives to the Cartesian sampling pattern are crucial to efficiently process multiple dimensions and large data sets. I will suggest alternative sampling patterns and show how these can make an impact in applications in graphics and visualization as well as for the computational sciences.
About the speaker
Torsten Möller is an associate professor at the School of Computing Science at Simon Fraser University. He received his PhD in Computer and Information Science from Ohio State University in 1999 and a Vordiplom (BSc) in mathematical computer science from Humboldt University of Berlin, Germany. His research interests include the fields of Visualization and Computer Graphics, especially the mathematical foundations thereof.
He is the director of Vivarium, co-director of the Graphics, Usability and Visualization Lab (GrUVi) and serves on the Board of Advisors for the Centre for Scientific Computing at Simon Fraser University. He is the appointed Vice Chair for Publications of the IEEE Visualization and Graphics Technical Committee (VGTC). He has served on a number of program committees (including the Eurographics and IEEE Visualization conferences) and has been papers cochair for IEEE Visualization, EuroVis, Graphics Interface, and the Workshop on Volume Graphics as well as the Visualization track of the 2007 International Symposium on Visual Computing. He has also co-organized the 2004 Workshop on Mathematical Foundations of Scientific Visualization, Computer Graphics, and Massive Data Exploration at the Banff International Research Station, Canada. He is currently serving on the steering committee of the Symposium on Volume Graphics. Further, he is an associate editor for the IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics (TVCG) as well as the Computer Graphics Forum.