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!
