An SGI to SGI 2024

With week one wrapped up, the SGI 2024 fellows embark on a first adventure into their respective research projects. Today, most of the teams would have already had their first meeting. As we dive deeper into various topics, I wish to write a record of week one– our tutorial week.

Our first day, Monday, 8 July 2024, began with a warm welcome by Dr. Justin Solomon, SGI Director. Without wasting any time, we dove into the introductory material of geometry processing with the guidance of Dr. Oded Stein, who also served as the tutorial week chair. We then had a session on visualizing 3D data with Dr. Qingnan Zhou, a research engineer at Adobe Research.

It is one of the guiding philosophies of SGI that many of the fellows come from various backgrounds. I thought to myself, “not everyone will be at the same skill-level.” To my pleasant surprise, Dr. Stein’s material covered the absolute basics bringing everyone on the call to the same page, or rather presentation slide. The remaining four days followed the same principle, which is something I found admirable.

Our second day, slightly more complicated, was all about parameterization. The introduction was delivered by Richard Liu, a Ph.D. student at the University of Chicago, followed by a lecture on texture maps using PyTorch and texture optimization by Dale Decatur, also a Ph.D. student at UChicago. As a part of their lecture, Richard and Dale also assisted in setting up Jupyter notebooks to complete exercises– it was great help to those new to using such tools.

Since day two was slightly more complicated, there were many great, deep questions about the material. I want to point out the commendable job of the TAs and lecturers themselves on their quick turnaround, succinct answers, and vast resourcefulness. So many papers and articles were exchanged to enhance understanding!

Our third day was a day of realism. Soon-to-be faculty member at Columbia University, Silvia Sellán, covered how the academic community represents 2D- and 3D-shapes. Silvia emphasized the needs of the industry and academic community and offered the pros and cons of each representation. It all came down what a problem needs and what data is available to solve the problem. Silvia also offered a taste of alternate application to common methods and encouraged the 2024 fellows to do the same as they pursue research. The day ended with a guest appearance by Towaki Takikawa, a Ph.D. student from the University of Toronto. Towaki spoke about alternate geometry representations and neural fields with some live demos.

Day four dove deeper into geometry processing algorithms– a special focus on the level-of-detail methods. Which, having understood it, is really intuitive and neat thing to have in our toolbox! This material was taught by Derek Liu, a research scientist at Roblox Inc., and Eris Zhang, a Ph.D. student at Stanford. These talks were the most technical in the tutorial week. I think all the fellows appreciated Derek’s and Eris’s help toward the end of the day to stay back and assist everyone with the exercises.

Our last day was with Dr. Nicholas Sharp, a research scientist at NVIDIA who is also the author of a community-favorite software program, Polyscope. Dr. Sharp focused on what I think is the most important skill in all of programming: debugging. What if we get bad data? How do we deal with data that is beyond what is ideal? Day five was all about code-writing practices and debugging relating to these questions. While this day was technical, Dr. Sharp made it intuitive and easy-to-digest. We also had a complementary session by guest speaker Zachary Ferguson, a postdoc at MIT, on dealing with floating points in collision detection.

Five days of studying all kinds of new things. I, for one, am excited to work on my first project. With such a robust introduction, I feel more confident, as I am sure do others. Good luck to all the fellows, mentors, and volunteers!