Silvia Sellán
@sellan_s
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University of Toronto Computer Graphics and Geometry Processing PhD candidate. Vanier scholar, Adobe Fellow and EECS Rising Star.
Toronto, Ontario
Joined October 2015
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Pinned Tweet
I am suuuuper excited to announce that I will be joining
@Columbia
University as an Assistant Professor of Computer Science!! A big thank you to all the many mentors that selflessly helped get here :-)
Pictured: Me, "walking here". Am I doing this right?
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I am beyond excited to finally share that our newest paper, "Breaking Good: Fracture Modes for Realtime Destruction" will be presented at SIGGRAPH Asia 2022.
Video:
Paper:
Code:
🧵👇
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I'm really excited to finally share my first first-author SIGGRAPH paper, titled "Developability of Heightfields via Rank Minimization" and co-authored by Noam Aigerman and
@_AlecJacobson
. You can find it on ! I will summarize its key ideas in this thread:
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This has been a wild week, in which I've gotten to add four new papers to my website. Which is as good excuse as any to announce that 🌟🌟I will be looking for a faculty job this season🌟🌟 If you have any leads, please contact me!
Stay tuned for details on all these works ☺️
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I am proud to share our (with
@_AlecJacobson
) SIGGRAPH Asia paper “Stochastic Poisson Surface Reconstruction”. We look at a classic algorithm from a new perspective which I hope you’ll find instes :-)
You can find the paper at or keep reading 🧵 below 👇
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I wrote an absolute beginner guide to rendering your next paper figure in Blender. I hope it’s useful for someone, especially new students! I welcome suggestions and additions:
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I recently updated and expanded my "Blender for Academic papers" guide with a whole new section on using
@HTDerekLiu
's BlenderToolbox for rendering with Python scripts. Enjoy!
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From the GitHub repo! 2 thumbs down, 9 laughing reactions. If that doesn’t say systemic problem, I don’t know what does.
Jesus Christ. Saving this link for the next time someone asks "Why do we need EDI in Computer Science programs?"
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It sucks that there are people in the world who will screenshot private conversations to complain about their colleagues' mistakes (presumably to feel superior?). Don't do this.
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I’m at
#SIGGRAPHAsia2023
to present two papers on surface reconstruction and cheer on Zoë Marschner ‘s talk on neural SDFs. If you are around Sydney and want to talk about any of these, or challenge me to a run, reach out!
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Hi everyone!! I am extremely excited to finally share my
#SIGGRAPH2021
work on computing swept volumes, a product of my internship at
@AdobeResearch
mentored by
@AigermanNoam
and advised by
@_AlecJacobson
.
You can find our paper and submission video at
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Jesus Christ. Saving this link for the next time someone asks "Why do we need EDI in Computer Science programs?"
Animate Anyone: Consistent and Controllable Image-to-Video Synthesis for Character Animation
proj:
abs:
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Gpytoobox, our (
@OdedStein
's and mine) newly launched geometry processing python library, is looking for users and contributors! Also, check out this super cute logo:
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I am finally sharing my newest SIGGRAPH Asia paper, on computing morphological operations on surfaces with a geometric curvature-based flow.
This was a joint work with J. Kesten, Y.S. Ang, and
@_AlecJacobson
.
Cool animations in the thread below!! 🧵
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Just heard an American use “acre-feet” as a volume unit. How do I even recover from this
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I am extremely happy to have been named a 2022
@AdobeResearch
Fellow ().
I owe much of this and other honours to my PhD supervisor
@_AlecJacobson
and my Adobe mentor
@AigermanNoam
. I am very privileged to get to work with both!
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Writing my faculty search statement and accidentally spelled it "Totoronto" (gives you a sense of the state my brain's at after working on this for days...). So I asked DALLE-3 to give me its interpretation of "Totoronto", and I love it:
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I am going over prof.
@keenanisalive
's Discrete Diff. Geometry lectures on youtube. Thoughts:
- Great resource and incredible that it's free on youtube. Especially recommend the exterior calc. parts.
- Keenan's voice is wasted not doing videogame commentary on Youtube
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As someone working in graphics research I have to say: Between this by
@thejenna
and
@doomquasar
's video on shaders (), the
@Polygon
team is making very rare accessible and accurate summaries of complex graphics concepts!!
for the record I wanted the image for my new video to say "BIG RIG" but was voted down, anyway check out my new video about character rigs and skeletons
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Zürich: pob. 400,000
Bilbao: pob. 350,000
a
Lausanne: pob. 137,000
Gijón/Xixón: pob. 270,000
Distancias similares (~230km vs 260km por carretera)
España: 8h 37min, una vez al día
Suiza: 2h 30min, cada hora
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My appointment will begin in July 2025. Soon I will be graduating in Toronto and will move to MIT to work as a postdoctoral associate with
@JustinMSolomon
, which means I have a full year to learn to be a professor and practice my bagel and pizza eating skills. Wish me luck!
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We just released an implementation of our algorithm as part of Gpytoolbox:
But I'm also trying something new! If you want to see a beginner-friendly tutorial of how to use our code, you can follow this:
I am proud to share our (with
@_AlecJacobson
) SIGGRAPH Asia paper “Stochastic Poisson Surface Reconstruction”. We look at a classic algorithm from a new perspective which I hope you’ll find instes :-)
You can find the paper at or keep reading 🧵 below 👇
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So,
#SIGGRAPH
Asia 2022 authors have to provide (for free):
- A paper (duh)
- A 40s fast-forward
- A 3-5min recorded summary talk
- A 15-20min recorded video presentation
- A 10min in-person presentation
- A poster / live demo / live discussion materials
Cool.
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If you ask stable diffusion to make a picture of the Toronto skyline and you tune the parameter to make it "more" Toronto, Stable Diffusion just adds more CN towers, haha
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I made it for the first time to the
#SIGGRAPH2021
technical papers trailer which I guess means my career can only go down from here!
Really excited for this year's talks :-)
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“Thou traceth thy rayth in an week-end”
So today I found this picture, can you guess where it comes from?
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Fellow geometry people: In (the magnificent) "This is me trying", Taylor Swift says "I was so ahead of the curve, the curve became a sphere". What does this mean?
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How can one design a neural network F to recover 2D functions that look like this one (smooth and continuous almost-everywhere, not just *exactly* this one)?
Input feature must be a 2D vector (x,y). Output F(x,y) must be a scalar between zero and one.
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Good morning! Today I am at
#SGP2022
@GeometryProcess
talking about using Blender to make pretty pictures for your next academic paper :-) You can watch a sneak peek of my talk here:
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Check this out! We (mostly not me) wrote a bunch of guides on how to write your next SIGGRAPH paper:
Thanks to
@OdedStein
for putting all together!
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Been using
@nmwsharp
's today and I have to say, what a great interface! (Thanks to
@RanaHanocka
for the recommendation :-) )
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Natural Voronoi!
We may have made a slight miscalculation on how many cookies we could fit on this tray.
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Haha, I ask ChatGPT what papers will be at SIGGRAPH Asia this year and even ChatGPT knows to go to Ke-Sen Huang's website instead of the official one:
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I guess I should re-up this now that we are in SIGGRAPH deadline week. Follow my tutorial and get a beautiful paper figure in 15 minutes or get your money back*!
*by "money back", I mean "heartfelt apology". No actual money exchanged.
I wrote an absolute beginner guide to rendering your next paper figure in Blender. I hope it’s useful for someone, especially new students! I welcome suggestions and additions:
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My labmate Derek
@HTDerekLiu
graduated today. You all already know him as an amazing researcher, I am extremely lucky to also know him as an incredibly wise, humble, patient and dedicated mentor. Congratulations, Doctor Derek!
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A SIGGRAPH author told me "blending [between] male and female may produce some confusing results" so now I have a new twitter bio
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🏳️🌈🏳️⚧️🧀🪨We just released **version 0.1.0** of Gpytoolbox, our Python geometry processing research library🪨🧀🏳️⚧️🏳️🌈
This version adds many useful features, some thanks to our amazing contributors. We will be highlighting some of them, so stay tuned :-)
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I am only on my second PhD year and I am far from an expert on anything, but if you're a member of an underrepresented community in Computer Graphics and thinking about applying to graduate school this season, I am happy to chat and share advice/resources with you :)
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He paused for a minute to tweet this, then went back to helping me on my paper deadline until midnight; thus proving just how deserving of this he is. Congrats, Alec!
Well, well, well. I have been approved for tenure. 🤗
Maybe I'll never update my academic website ever again.
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Our talk (
@ana_dodik
's and I) on gender in computer graphics in research is finally on Youtube. We worked pretty hard on this! Hopefully enough of you will watch it that it'll start a conversation in our field:
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Our geometry processing library Gpytoolbox just had its first external contribution and it makes me so happy☺️
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I don't really know what to say! My sincerest thanks to
@_AlecJacobson
@AigermanNoam
@mirelaben
who supported me in applying for this scholarship!
🎉 Congratulations,
@sellan_s
, Vanier Scholar!!!
Silvia exemplifies Vanier's mission to identify academic excellence, research potential and leadership.
Richly deserved. We're all excited to see what you'll do!
#VanierCanada
@UofTCompSci
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No offence numpy but it really seems like you're just not trying very hard
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I've been fortunate enough in the past few years to meet and work with jaw-droopingly smart and knowledgeable people in my field.
What impresses me the most about them is how readily they will admit to not knowing something and never make fun of someone for being ignorant.
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Looking for a last-minute gift this holiday season? Give the gift of open source software with our (with
@OdedStein
) newest *0.0.3* release of Gpytoolbox, now including an implementation of Stochastic Poisson Surface Reconstruction!
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I made a thing (well, I followed a Blender Youtube tutorial which made a thing)!
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It’s a real honor to belong to
@UofTCompSci
!
Computer graphics researcher and
@UofTCompSci
PhD student Silvia Sellán (
@sellan_s
) has been awarded two prestigious scholarships: the
@UofTArtSci
2021 Dean's Doctoral Excellence Scholarship and a
#VanierCanada
Graduate Scholarship 👏
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Better late than never! I've decided to release public Matlab code to replicate all the results in our SGP 2019 paper "Solid Geometry Processing on Deconstructed Domains"
Code:
Paper:
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Trying to give the conference chairs the benefit of the doubt but I truly do not understand this blanket ban. As I understand it, LLMs, like Photoshop or GitHub copilot, is a tool that can have both legitimate (e.g., I use it as a non-native English speaker) and nefarious uses…
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In this season of scholarship/graduate acceptances and rejections, it can feel lonely to receive rejections and see everyone else share only their acceptances.
So anyway, here's a collage of the three times I got rejected from this scholarship in 2019, 2020 and 2021. Persist!
I am extremely happy to have been named a 2022
@AdobeResearch
Fellow ().
I owe much of this and other honours to my PhD supervisor
@_AlecJacobson
and my Adobe mentor
@AigermanNoam
. I am very privileged to get to work with both!
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Nothing says "shit got real" for me when programming like drawing a reminder for where left, right, top and bottom are :p
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After posting this and trying to enter the gender neutral restroom, a security guard stopped me and said “no, the women’s bathroom is that way”.
Wtf!? Don’t stop people who are entering a gender neutral restroom!?
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I will be chairing this session, so rest assured I will be asking
@rohansawhney1
the hard questions, like "why pick the most disgusting 3D shape in history to be forever associated with your paper?"
We have a SSSTAR lineup for next week's episode of our colloquium, featuring
@rohansawhney1
from "Monte-Carlo Geometry Processing" and Prof.
@mirelaben
from [basically every paper in geometry processing]!!!
Join us at 9 AM Eastern on Wednesday at :D
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This is such a meaningless post. Imagine any other employer posting the “cost” of each employee, without any mention of the income generated by the employee, to make it sound like it’s a favor to the employee.
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For the geometry-heads among us, the
@GeometryProcess
SGP graduate school videos are all recorded and they are a treasure trove of amazing talks and tutorials you may not find anywhere else:
We've listed some of our favorite
#graphics
learning resources here , spanning everything from
@twominutepapers
, to our go-to
#raytracing
tutorial, to a stellar guide to FEM simulation. Are we missing any resources? Reply to this tweet and let us know!
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I wrote an implementation of the Botsch-Kobbelt local remesher in C++ using libigl with wrappers for Matlab and as a command line tool!
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This is pretty incredible, and maybe exclusive to scientific reporting. What other kind of reporter can confidently say "I have no idea what of the basics of the topic I am writing about, nor am I interested in it" and still have a job the next day?
andres freund: genius programmer responsible for one of the most widely used pieces of software in the world, just single-handedly stopped a huge attack from happening. nyt journalist: 'i am too fucking stupid to understand his work and won't even try but it's very boring!!!'
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Hi all! I'm going to be travelling to a bunch of cities soon: Waterloo, Montreal, New York, New Haven, Baltimore, D.C., Boston, New Orleans (NeurIPS), Daegu (SIGGRAPH) and Seoul. If you're based at any of these and want to meet up and talk graphics, reach out! My DMs are open :-)
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there's such a childish joy to playing with minimization algorithms
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If you are an undergrad looking for a research opportunity (and I know you're there! I get your emails!), this is your chance!! Applications close February 15 :-) I can't recommend this enough
Announcing SGI 2024! Undergrads and MS students: Apply for 6 weeks of paid summer geometry processing research. No experience needed: 1 week tutorials + 5 weeks of projects. Mentors are top researchers in this emerging branch of graphics/computing/math.
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Buttigieg: "If you're a transgender kid who needs to go to the bathroom like everybody else..."
Bill Maher: "But how often does that happen? Is that really an issue?"
Buttigieg: "Well if you're transgender, it happens several times a day"
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
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But seriously: why do siggraph asia reviews come out on a Thursday and rebuttals are due on a Monday? Can’t I have a weekend off in mid July?
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A few months ago, I got an NSERC Vanier Graduate Scholarship. I felt honoured that just two years after arriving in this country, the Canadian government was choosing to bet on my research and spend hard-earned Canadian taxpayer’s money on me. It came at a strange time, though…
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Uncertainty is cool! Such an honour to have contributed to this.
I have never met a student so knowledgeable about every detail of their work and its place among the state of the art as Lily. You'd do well to remember her name!
Check out our work here:
Have you seen our new work on Uncertainty Quantification in NeRFs? 🤩
Wanna know how you can do this as a ✨post-hoc✨ method on any pre-trained NeRF of your favourite architecture in matter of minutes?
Here’s a high-level explanation! 🧵👇
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You all put your cute green buttons in your libraries and made me jealous :-) So I spent the past day writing a GitHub action for my python geometry processing library:
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Wow, the Blender 3.0 improved cycles rendering is a game changer! So fast that I can even render animations locally on my laptop... Gotta love amazing (free!) software :)
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Tagging every North American CS department here
@vasantmishra99
@BarbaraFantechi
No, applications are of course free of charge.
You may apply regardless of your country of origin.
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🏳️🌈🏳️🌈🏳️🌈🏳️🌈🏳️🌈🏳️🌈🏳️🌈🏳️🌈🏳️🌈🏳️🌈🏳️🌈
Happy Pride! This month, I am even prouder than usual, since we can reveal our upcoming SIGGRAPH talk on sex and gender in graphics research.
🏳️⚧️🏳️⚧️🏳️⚧️🏳️⚧️🏳️⚧️🏳️⚧️🏳️⚧️🏳️⚧️🏳️⚧️🏳️⚧️🏳️⚧️
Check out our work at
Did you notice that the way gender and sex are represented in graphics research seems a bit outdated? 🏳️⚧️
If you said “yes” (and especially if you said “no”), you should check out our upcoming short talk at SIGGRAPH, together with
@sellan_s
,
@_TheodoreKim
, and
@GamerTroublePhD
!
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SGP was so much fun! My absolute highlight was "SimJEB: Simulated Jet Engine Bracket Dataset" by E. Whalen, A. Beyene and C. Mueller. A dataset of hand-designed CAD models *with stuctural simulations*. Just great, I will use this so much from now on!!
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The flood gates are definitively open: there is room for discussion of gender bias in the siggraph technical program!
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NASA engineers be like: “w-w-will ten litres of maple syrup suffice for your eight day trip, sir?”
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After ICCV in Paris, I am getting on the flight to Toronto and can’t wait to be back home.
It is not lost on me that many of my colleagues are instead flying back to closed airports, bombings, shelters, blood drives, guns, hatred and war. My thoughts are with you, friends.
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I will be giving a talk at
@UWaterloo
@UWCheritonCS
this Friday at 1:30 pm. Join to hear me talk about surface reconstruction!
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A lot of people (myself included) use ML, including LLMs like chatGPT, to transmit their ideas in more fluent English. This ban, willingly or not, enforces academic gatekeeping. Is it worth it?
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I was on a podcast (!!!) talking about "Stochastic Poisson Surface Reconstruction. It was really fun! If you want a more casual introduction to our paper than you can listen to while on a jog/cooking dinner/travelling, this is your chance!
New episode ALERT!
In this episode we hosted
@sellan_s
to chat about her
@SIGGRAPHAsia
paper : "Stochastic Poisson Surface Reconstruction".
Co-authors:
@_AlecJacobson
🧵
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Uncontroversial opinion:
If a computer scientist writes an ML paper that classifies birds into different species while making wrong assumptions about the diversity of birds, not consulting with a biologist or wildlife expert and not knowing what a species is, that is bad science
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Some conference days it is harder to find a session *without* a UofT paper than the opposite. Truly the best department one could be a part of 🥰
Computer graphics research from
@UofTCompSci
is well represented at
#SIGGRAPHAsia2023
, with 14 accepted technical papers, including a Best Paper win!
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Our (and my first) SIGGRAPH paper "Developability of Heightfields via Rank Minimization has been granted the Graphics Replicability Stamp. Yay!
You can find our code, paper and close-captioned talk at
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I am so proud to have played a minuscule role in helping make this happen, and to get to teach the students this week :)
A preview of my lecture:
Our Fellows have been interacting over Slack and by attending SGP
@GeometryProcess
. Next, they complete a week of tutorials on state-of-the-art methods in geometry led by
@OdedStein
,
@sellan_s
,
@HTDerekLiu
,
@amirvaxman_dgp
, & Michal Edelstein, followed by 5 weeks of research.
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*twice now* I have been stopped from entering a *gender neutral* restroom by the event security.
@NeurIPSConf
, wtf??
After posting this and trying to enter the gender neutral restroom, a security guard stopped me and said “no, the women’s bathroom is that way”.
Wtf!? Don’t stop people who are entering a gender neutral restroom!?
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lol look at my face next to *tenured professor Emily Whiting* like our achievements are in any way similar haha
In our latest
#PathTracing
Spotlight, we chat with Silvia Sellán () and Emily Whiting () about organizing virtual colloquia and conferences. Read on for their insights on virtual venues, attendee engagement, and more!
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