Antonio Sanchez (left) and Andrew Ho at SIGGRAPH 2014.
GRAND congratulates Antonio Sanchez and Andrew Ho for winning first and second prizes respectively at the ACM Student Research Competition (SRC) hosted at SIGGRAPH 2014. Both PhD students are GRAND HQP supervised by Dr. Sidney Fels, a GRAND network investigator at UBC's Human Communications Technologies Lab.
The annual competition recognizes outstanding research in computer graphics and interactive techniques by individual graduate students or teams of undergraduates. Submitted SRC posters are reviewed by a panel of distinguished judges who select six semi-finalists - three in each of the graduate and undergraduate categories. First-place undergraduate and graduate winners go on to the nationwide ACM Student Research Competition.
Antonio Sanchez, a third-year PhD, took first prize for his poster "PolyMerge: A Fast Approach for Hex-Dominant Mesh Generation Geometry and Modeling." This new approach for generating meshes for 3-D computer models is much faster than the current state of the art. The algorithm constructs models with over 100,000 elements, composed of more than 80% hexahedra by volume, in less than a minute.
"It's been great meeting with people at GRAND - other fellow students that we also meet [at SIGGRAPH] to discuss our work and flesh out ideas. The community helps push our research forward," said Sanchez.
In second place was Andrew Ho, a fourth-year PhD ECE UBC. His poster "Dynamic Visualization of Swallowing From Multi-Slice Computed Tomography" offers an interactive 3D model of human swallowing created from multi-slice CT (X-Ray Computed Tomography) scans. The application uses open-source 3D computer graphics software Blender and Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics modelling to simulate the fluid movements.
"It's been great working with [Dr. Sidney Fels]," said Ho. "One of the good things about going to the GRAND conference was that this talk [at SIGGRAPH] was actually from the talk I did at [GRAND 2014 Annual Conference] earlier this year. The work from this talk started out my submission for the GRAND technical papers - started out as an "RNote" there – and turned into a poster at SIGGRAPH, and then turned into this award. Here is good motivation to submit RNotes!"