What does it take to write efficient proximity algorithms (for robotics, graphics and CAD)?

GRAND Seminar 11:00 am, April 15, Fri., 2011, ENGR 4201

Young J. Kim
http://home.ewha.ac.kr/~kimy/
Associate Professor
Ewha Womans University

Host:

Jyh-Ming Lien

Abstract:

Proximity query is a process to reason and derive a geometric relationship among, often time-dependent, objects in space. Typical proximity queries include - continuous and discrete collision detection, Euclidean distance computation, Hausdorff distance computation, penetration depth computation, etc. These queries play a vital role in diverse applications such as non-smooth contact dynamics, robot motion planning, physically-based animation and CAD disassembly planning. In this talk, we will focus on our recent research efforts to devise fast - mostly real-time - and efficient proximity algorithms with different objectives using rather simple approaches, thereby working extremely well in practice. Moreover, we also discuss how we can parallelize these calculations utilizing modern hardware platforms such as multi-core CPUs and GPUs. Finally, we demonstrate how to apply these queries to the aforementioned applications, particularly for robot motion planning and contact dynamics.

Bio:

Young J. Kim is an associate professor of computer science and engineering at Ewha Womans University. He received his PhD in computer science in 2000 from Purdue University. Before joining Ewha, he was a postdoctoral research fellow in the Department of Computer Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His research interests include interactive computer graphics, computer games, robotics, haptics, and geometric modeling. He has published more than 50 papers in leading conferences and journals in these fields. He also received the best paper awards at the ACM Solid Modeling Conference in 2003 and the International CAD Conference in 2008, and the best poster award at the Geometric Modeling and Processing conference in 2006. He was selected as best research faculty of Ewha in 2008, and received the outstanding research cases award from Korean research foundation in 2008.

For more information, please refer to http://graphics.ewha.ac.kr