CSE 590B: GRAPHICS SEMINAR

Autumn 2003

Instructors: 
    Maneesh Agrawala, Brian Curless, Zoran Popovic, 
    David Salesin, and Steve Seitz

Time: Wednesdays 3:30 - 5:00

Place: Mary Gates Hall (MGH) 284

Computer graphics is a truly wide-ranging discipline, encompassing 
and drawing upon areas as diverse as human perception, physics, 
animation, hardware architectures, numerical methods, geometry, image 
processing, natural phenomena, illustration, art, computer vision, and 
machine learning.  In this seminar, we'll look at a wide range of these
subjects as we review selected papers from a variety of recent
conferences including SIGGRAPH, the Eurographics Workshop on
Rendering, and CVPR.  

Following the example of years past, we will use a "pipelined"
approach for the seminar.  Each session will be divided into two
parts: an hour-long "activity" (introduced the previous week),
followed by a half-hour presentation introducing a new paper and an
activity for the following week.  The paper presentation might also
include a (short) overview of the research area and/or the
presentation of some related paper or contrasting approach.  The
prototypical "activity" is to spend the first half-hour of the session
in small groups of 3-4 discussing a set of questions about the
previous week's paper (such as identifying key areas for future
research), and then the second half-hour presenting the results of
these discussions to the larger group.  But we want to leave a lot of
room for creativity: the "activity" might also be staging a debate on
the relative merits of a particular approach, putting together a skit,
etc.  As the word implies, an "activity" just needs to be something
that really actively engages all the participants in the seminar,
forces us to really study the paper ahead of time, and provides an
educational experience for us all.

During the first meeting -- October 1 -- we will identify topic areas
and find teams of volunteers to present papers in those areas in the
weeks to come.  During the second meeting, we'll load the pipeline
with the first presentation, and over the following weeks, we'll start
with a discussion of the previous week's paper followed by
presentation of the next paper.

All are welcome; new students in particular are encouraged to attend.