Categories
News

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!

Categories
News

The Symposium on Geometry Processing 2024 – A Recap

The Symposium on Geometry Processing (SGP) is an annual event highly awaited in the geometry community. Researchers, enthusiasts, and newcomers alike flew in all over the globe to attend and enjoy the experience put together by this year’s organizing committee. As an incoming Summer Geometry Initiative fellow, when the opportunity to receive a travel grant to attend SGP 2024 arose, I immediately applied. A few days later, I received an email stating that I was a recipient, and almost a month later, I landed in Boston to be among 150 fellow participants.

Like most years, this year, SGP took place in two-parts: the graduate school from June 22-23, 2024, and the technical symposium from June 24-26, 2024, in MIT’s CSAIL building in Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA.

As a novice into geometry processing, the graduate school was a particularly helpful and robust introduction into the field. It was packed with foundational material that focused on the intuitive understanding of how geometric data was represented and processed. The motivation and goals of geometry process were well-laid out. I particularly enjoyed the talks on equivariant neural networks, sketch processing, introduction to geometry processing research in Python, and Monte Carlo methods. The talks had a much-needed balance of introductory, interactive material and in-depth analysis of useful methods. During this time, I also met many other novices like myself as well as those who push the frontier of geometry.

Equipped with the basics, I felt more confident attending the main event—the symposium. My favorites, right-off-the-bat were the three keynote speakers. They accomplished the great feat of inspiring an audience mixed with experts and beginners, and bring them to the same page. Dr. Xin Tong, Dr. Alec Jacobson, and Dr. Josephine Carstensen each covered complementary avenues of research—the broader scope, future direction, and innovative applications. The remaining 15-16 papers presented at the symposium were impressive in their own rights. While the selected papers covered a range of material, they all had one admirable thing in common: the papers were obvious by-products of passionate research.

The social events at the event were also a unique experience. Speaking to the presenters, organizers, fellow student researchers, and industry folks in the historic scene of Boston Tea Party Ships and Museum and the innovative display of MIT’s science museum set this symposium apart from other math conferences that I previously attended. I enjoyed talking to the presenters and getting to know them during and after the symposium. I built meaningful connections with all credit going towards the conference organizers on facilitating such an interaction.

For me, the most interesting problem is how data is represented. As someone that worked in bioinformatics and Boeing’s Phantom Works Estimating, the quality of data is immensely important. A common thread is that data is computationally and financially expensive to acquire so current data is relied upon heavily. Dr. Tong’s talk emphasized the need for better data and the papers reinforced this idea when it came to future direction. I have always been interested in better data representation and optimization for pipeline processing, but now, I am equipped with better direction and motivation.

I am grateful to have been the recipient of the SGP 2024 Student Travel Grant. I believe that I exhausted its resources to the best of my ability. The five-day event left a mark of inspiration on me that I could not erase if I tried.

Categories
News

Welcome to SGI 2024!

Welcome to the official blog of the Summer Geometry Initiative (SGI) 2024, taking place July 8-August 16! I’m Justin Solomon, director of SGI 2024 and PI of the MIT Geometric Data Processing Group.

First launched in 2021, SGI is a completely online program engaging a paid cohort of undergraduate and early master’s students in six weeks of training and research experiences related to applied geometry and geometry processing. SGI Fellows come from all over the globe and represent a wide variety of educational institutions, life/career paths, and fields of interest.

SGI aims to accomplish the following objectives:

  • spark collaboration among students and researchers in geometry processing,
  • launch inter-university research projects in geometry processing involving team members across broad levels of seniority (undergraduate, graduate, faculty, industrial researcher),
  • introduce students to geometry processing research and development, and
  • diversify the “pipeline” of students entering geometry processing research, in terms of gender, race, socioeconomic background, and home institution.

SGI aims to address a number of challenges and inequities in geometry processing. Not all universities host faculty whose work touches on this emerging field, reducing the cohort of students exposed to this discipline during their undergraduate careers. Moreover, as with many engineering and mathematical fields, geometry processing suffers from serious gender, racial, and socioeconomic imbalance; by giving a broad set of students access to geometry processing research experiences, over the longer term we hope to affect the composition of the geometry processing community.

SGI is supported by a worldwide network of volunteers, including faculty, graduate students, and research scientists in geometry and related disciplines. This team supports the SGI Fellows through mentorship, instruction, panel discussions, and several other means.

SGI 2024 is due to start in a few days! Each SGI Fellow has been mailed a box of swag from our many sponsors, a certificate, and a custom-made coffee mug designed by SGI 2024 Fellows Ehsan Shams, Aniket Rajnish, and others.

We’ll kick off next week with tutorials in geometry processing led by Oded Stein (MIT), Dale Decatur/Richard Liu (University of Chicago), Silvia Sellán (U of Toronto), Jiayi Eris Zhang (Stanford)/Derek Liu (Roblox), and Nick Sharp (NVIDIA). Then, in the remaining 5 weeks, our Fellows will have the opportunity to participate in multiple short-term (1-2 week) research projects, intended to kick off collaborations that last over the longer term. Check out last year’s SGI blog for examples of the kinds of projects they’ll be working on.

Revisit this blog as the summer progresses for updates on SGI 2024 and to read about the exciting ideas our Fellows are developing in geometry!