Archived

The information presented here is out of date and is no longer being maintained. Please visit our current website at cs.ubc.ca/labs/imager for the most up-to-date information.

News and Events

  • January 2017:       Skin simulation software developed in Prof. Dinesh K. Pai's group was used to make the fantastic beasts in the blockbuster film based on J. K. Rowling’s “Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them.” The skin software, called Vital Skin, uses a patent-pending simulation algorithm published in SIGGRAPH 2013 and developed by the UBC spinoff company Vital Mechanics. VFX studio Image Engine Design used Vital Skin FX to create the realistic skin movement of magical creatures such as Graphorns.
  • November 2016:       Kellogg Booth, former post-doc Dr. Narges Mahyar, former Computer Science students Cathy Meng and Ernest Xiang, and colleagues in SLAIS and SALA, won an honourable mention for their paper "UD Co-Spaces: A Table-Centred Multi-Display Environment for Public Engagement in Urban Design Charrettes” at this year's ACM Interactive Surfaces and Spaces (ISS 2016) conference. The paper describes the design and evaluation of a system to support the charrette process for urban design. The system is a multi-touch tabletop application for neighbourhood planning that is integrated with large wall displays and hand-held personal displays. A series of studies in real-world planning workshops and in laboratory settings examined the degree to which multi-display environments can engage a broad range of stakeholders in decision making and foster collaboration and co-creation. The research was conducted under funding from an NSERC strategic project grant “IDEAS2.0: Integrative Data-Enabled Approaches to Sustainability across Scales” .
  • October 2016:       Alla Sheffer, together with Professor Karan Singh from University of Toronto, received $125,000 of research funding from the NSERC Idea to Innovate (I2I) Program. The I2I grant is intended to support the development of a 3D software package that will enable designers to create three dimensional (3D) models directly from two dimensional (2D) concept sketches. Sketching is the first step in design, whether it is a drawing of a new concept car, a virtual spaceship for a movie, or a do-it-yourself customized 3D printed toy. Currently these design sketches are used purely as a reference when the designer proceeds to create the actual 3D model using conventional modeling software. In contrast, a person can view a 2D designer sketch of an object and instantly understand the 3D model depicted by the sketch. Having an algorithm which mimics this process would enable designers to directly convert their sketches into 3D models, reducing the need for cumbersome modeling software. With its powerful algorithms, the developed software will mimic how the human brain interprets 2D sketches and create a 3D model directly from the sketch. Sheffer and Singh are uniquely positioned to achieve this goal by combining a series of algorithms they recently developed, that transform 2D design drawings into surfaced 3D models. These methods, centered around the True2Form algorithm for converting 2D concept sketches into 3D curve networks, define the state of the art in sketch-based modeling of man-made shapes and outperform existing methods in terms of workflow, ease of use, versatility, and robustness.
  • September 2016:       Computer Science Department ranking website http://csrankings.org places UBC Computer Science in the top 4 across universities worldwide for computer graphics, as measured by top-tier publications during 2008-2016. We knew for many years that UBC Computer Science had one of the best computer graphics research groups in the world, and now we have some more numbers to show it. A new ranking of computer science departments across North America and Europe based on numbers of papers at top venues (csrankings.org), ranks UBC as #4 for computer graphics research, just behind a select few departments such as MIT and Stanford. The ranking for computer graphics is based on number of papers published in ACM Transactions on Graphics, including the proceedings of SIGGRAPH and SIGGRAPH Asia, the most competitive venues in this field. UBC computer graphics faculty Robert Bridson, Wolfgang Heidrich, Dinesh Pai, Alla Sheffer, and Michiel van de Panne conduct research across a range of areas within computer graphics, including, modeling, imaging, rendering and animation and actively collaborate with many other top research groups in the world.
  • July 2016:       A team from UBC Computer Science led by Professor Dinesh Pai received the Web3D Best Paper Award for Real-Time Eye Simulation at the 2016 ACM SIGGRAPH Web3D conference, held in Anaheim, CA, from July 22 to July 24, 2016. The region of the face around the eyes is critically important for conveying lifelike realism in character animation, especially for human characters. But this has proved extremely challenging in real-time settings such as games and in the web browser. UBC research in Prof. Pai's group addresses this key deficiency with new techniques and software that can run in real-time in modern browsers, including on mobile phones. For more information, and to try the software, visit D. R. Neog, J. Cardoso, A. Ranjan and D. K. Pai, “Interactive Gaze Driven Animation of the Eye Region,” in Proceedings of the ACM SIGGRAPH Web3D conference (21st Annual International Conference on 3D Web Technology), Anaheim, CA, July 22-24, 2016.
  • June 2016:       Congratulations to Kellogg Booth, who last week was awarded the 2016 Canadian Digital Media Pioneer Award. As the award citation notes, "It is hard to imagine a single individual working in the field over the past 40 years who has done as much to foster Canadian excellence in new media research than Kellogg Booth. He has consistently been a selfless advocate, leader, mentor, and practitioner in the field. As such, he is a true Canadian Digital Media Pioneer." His vision in launching and leading the GRAND Network of Centres of Excellence have had impact far beyond UBC, across all of Canada. Previous winners of the award include a prestigious pantheon of Canadian innovators in digital media, including the inventors of computer-based keyframing, the pioneer of multi-touch systems, the President of EA Worldwide Studios who further led the development of the Xbox Kinect, and the founders of SMART Technologies. More information at the Graphics Interface website .
  • June 2016:       Michiel van de Panne received the 2016 Achievement Award from the Canadian Human-Computer Communication Society at its annual Graphics Interface conference (June 1-3) in Victoria, BC. The award recognizes Canadian researchers who have made substantial contributions to the fields of computer graphics, visualization, or human-computer interaction. He was given the award for research that spans computer graphics, computer animation, and robotics, the modeling of human and animal motion and the motor skills that underly that movement. The award was established in 1990 and awarded from time to time since then, most recently on an annual basis. Michiel is the third UBC Computer Science faculty member to receive this award. The first was Professor Alain Fournier in 1994. More information at the Graphics Interface website .
  • February 2016:       Joanna McGrenere is the recipient of the 2015 UBC Killam Faculty Research Fellowship. Offered on a competitive basis, these awards are intended to support faculty members engaged in research projects of broad significance. Joanna is spending her sabbatical year in Paris collaborating with researchers at INRIA studying co-adaptive human-computer-interaction: how users appropriate software applications for their own use, adapt the software to their needs, and adapt themselves to the software’s constraints.
  • January 2016:       UBC Computer Science and the Imager lab will be well represented at CHI 2016. The following papers have been accepted:
  • Janzen, I., Rajendran, V. K., & Booth, K. S. (2016, May 7-12). The impact of target depth on pointing performance. ACM Conf. on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '16), San Jose, CA.
  • Ponsard, A., & McGrenere, J. (2016, May 7-12). Anchored Customization: Anchoring Settings to the Application Interface to Afford Customization. ACM Conf. on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '16), San Jose, CA.
  • Schneider, O.S., Seifi, H., Kashani, S., Chun, M., & MacLean, K. E. (2016, May 7-12). HapTurk: Crowdsourcing Affective Ratings of Vibrotactile Icons. ACM Conf. on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '16), San Jose, CA. Abstract: Vibrotactile (VT) display is becoming a standard component of informative user experience, where notifications and feedback must convey information eyes-free. However, effective design is hindered by incomplete understanding of relevant perceptual qualities. To access evaluation streamlining now common in visual design, we introduce proxy modalities as a way to crowdsource VT sensations by reliably communicating high-level features through a crowd-accessible channel. We investigate two proxy modalities to represent a high-fidelity tactor: a new VT visualization, and low-fidelity vibratory translations playable on commodity smartphones. We translated 10 high-fidelity vibrations into both modalities, and in two user studies found that both proxy modalities can communicate affective features, and are consistent when deployed remotely over Mechanical Turk. We analyze fit of features to modalities and suggest future improvements. Preprint: https://www.dropbox.com/s/1ggf104rneyni50/Hapturk_CHI16-cameraready-2015-01-13c.pdf?dl=0 Video: On its way, finished within 1 week.
  • The following paper was accepted for the Macaron Haptics Symposium:
  • Schneider, O.S. & MacLean, K.E. (2016, April 8-11). Studying Design Process and Example Use with Macaron, a Web-based Vibrotactile Effect Editor. IEEE Haptics Symposium (HAPTICS’16). Philadelphia, PA, USA. Abstract: Examples are a critical part of any design process. However, current libraries for vibrotactile (VT) effects provide neither insight into examples’ construction nor capability for their deconstruction and re-composition. To investigate example use in VT design, we introduce Macaron, a web-based VT effect editor built as both a practical tool that leverages examples, and a means of studying the VT design process. We used Macaron to qualitatively characterize participants’ design processes, and observed two basic uses of examples: as a starting point or template for a design task, and as a method of learning to use VT parameters effectively. We discuss how features supporting internal visibility and composition influenced these example uses, and articulate several implications for VT editing tools and libraries of VT examples. We conclude with future work, including plans to deploy Macaron online to examine examples and other aspects of VT design in situ. Preprint: coming (next 1-2 weeks, the camera-ready version hasn’t been uploaded yet). Image: coming (next 1-2 weeks). Video: coming (next 1-2 weeks).
  • November 2015:       Tamara Munzner is the recipient of the 2015 Visualization Technical Achievement Award. The award is given in recognition of her foundational research that has 'produced a scientific basis for principles and design choices for visualization', which culminated in her 2014 book Visualization Analysis and Design from CRC Press. The award was presented at the IEEE VIS Conference in Chicago on Oct 27, 2015. Tamara is the first female recipient of the award since the IEEE Visualization and Graphics Technical Committee started the awards program in 2004. For the full details, see https://www.cs.ubc.ca/news/2015/11/ubc-computer-science-professor-tamara-munzner-receives-2015-visualization-technical-ach
  • October 2015:       Oliver Schneider and Karon MacLean partner with Disney Research to develop haptic animation tools. New technology developed at Disney Research can create touch-based (“haptic”) sensations that move across your skin, creating literal shivers down your spine. These types of effects improve user experience with games, rides, and other media, both for entertainment and for assistive or educational applications. Unfortunately, it's difficult to for artists to create haptic effects without dedicated tools. Two UBC computer science researchers, PhD student Oliver Schneider and Professor Karon MacLean of the SPIN lab teamed up with Disney researcher Ali Israr to develop an easy-to-use tool that lets expert artists create new effects. Artist can simply click and drag “animation objects”, phantom vibrations that can be arranged and synchronized using a timeline, just like traditional animation. To do this, they had to develop a new interface, pipeline, and set of rendering algorithms to translate easy-to-use animation objects into vibration profiles on multi-actuator devices, like a gaming chair. Previously, artists would have to work with these actuators directly, making it difficult to create effects like motion. “Working with Disney has been an incredible experience,” says Oliver, of his internship and continuing collaboration. “Being a part of their creative culture and seeing artists at work has helped me better understand storytelling and artists’ processes, which I can directly apply to my doctoral research on haptic experience design.” Their animation tool, Mango, and findings from the study will be presented at the upcoming UIST conference in Charlotte, North Carolina. Mango, and its underlying rendering pipeline, can also be applied to interactive performances, or other devices like midair haptic feedback to reduce distraction when driving cars.
  • Sept 2015:       Welcome new students, post-docs and visitors!
  • Paul Bucci (MSc student, supervisor Karon MacLean)
  • Kimberly Dextras-Romagnino (MSc student, supervisor Karon MacLean)
  • Louie Dinh (MSc student, supervisor Tamara Munzner)
  • Wenqiang Dong (MSc student, supervisor Tamara Munzner)
  • Minchen Li (MSc student, supervisor Alla Sheffer)
  • Zipeng Liu (MSc student, supervisor Tamara Munzner)
  • Xue Bin (Jason) Peng (MSc student, supervisor Michiel van de Panne)
  • Dilan Ustek (MSc student, supervisor Karon MacLean)
  • Meghana Venkataswamy (MSc student, supervisor Karon MacLean)
  • Jussi Rantala (Post-doctoral Fellow, supervisor Karon MacLean)
  • Ricardo Caceffo (Post-doctoral Fellow, supervisor Kellogg Booth)
  • Merel Jung (Visiting International Research Student, supervisor Karon MacLean)
  • August 2015:       Benjamin Humberston and Professor Dinesh Pai were awarded best paper at the Symposium on Computer Animation (SCA) for their paper "Hands On: Interactive Animation of Precision Manipulation and Contact".
  • August 2015:       Kai Ding, Post-doc Libin Liu, Professor Michiel van de Panne and KangKang Yin (faculty member at the National University of Singapore and UBC alumna) were awarded best paper at the Symposium on Computer Animation (SCA) for their paper "Learning Reduced-Order Feedback Policies for Motion Skills".
  • July 2015:       Professor Alla Sheffer and her co-authors from University of Berkeley, received the 2015 North American Manufacturing Research Conference (NAMRC) Outstanding Paper Award. The paper, Energy-Efficient Vector Field Based Toolpaths for CNC Pocket Machining , employs ideas from computer graphics, specifically text layout, for CNC path computation.
  • June 2015:       A team from the UBC SPIN (Sensory Perception and Interaction Research ) Lab consisting of Brenna Li, Gordon Minaker, Paul Bucci, and Oliver Schneider (supervised by Professor Karon MacLean) won first place at the World Haptics 2015 Student Innovation Challenge. This challenge was the first of its kind at a haptics conference, offering student teams an opportunity to solve a problem by programming the TPad Phone, a variable-friction display that allows users to feel texture on a touch screen. The UBC team’s project, RoughSketch, explored different interaction techniques through a drawing app, like an ink pen writing on paper, the slipperiness of finger painting, and the friction of a rubber eraser. RoughSketch was voted the best of 25 applicants and 9 finalists, netting the team a cash prize and a Microsoft Surface each.
  • May 2015:       UBC Computer Science and the Imager lab will be well represented at ACM SIGGRAPH 2015. The following papers have been accepted:
  • Bin Wang, Longhua Wu, KangKang Yin, Uri Ascher, Libin Liu, Hui Huang (Imager member: Liu), “Deformation Capture and Modeling of Soft Objects”
  • Xinxin Zhang, Robert Bridson, Chen Greif, (Imager members: Zhang, Bridson), “Restoring the Missing Vortices in Advection Projection Fluid Solvers”
  • Yufeng Zhu, Robert Bridson, Chen Greif (Imager members: Zhu, Bridson), “Simulating Rigid Body Fracture with Surface Meshes”
  • Felix Heide, Wolfgang Heidrich, Matthias Hullin, Gordon Wetzstein (Imager members Heide, Heidrich), “Doppler Time-of-Flight Imaging”
  • Prashant Sachdeva, Shinjiro Sueda, Susanne Bradley, Mikhail Fain, Dinesh K. Pai (Imager members Sachdeva, Pai), “Biomechanical Simulation and Control of Hands and Tendinous Systems”
  • Gilles-Philippe Paille, Nicolas Ray, Pierre Poulin, Alla Sheffer, Bruno Levy (Imager member: Sheffer), “Dihedral Angle-based Maps of Tetrahedral Meshes”
  • Marco Livesu, Alla Sheffer, Nicholas Vining, Marco Tarini (Imager members: Livesu, Sheffer, Vining), “Practical Hex-Mesh Optimization via Edge-Cone Rectification”
  • Pan Hao, Yang Liu, Alla Sheffer, Nicholas Vining, Chang-Jian Li, Wenping Wang (Imager members: Sheffer, Vining), “Flow Aligned Surfacing of Curve Networks”
  • Xue Bin Peng, Glen Berseth, Michiel van de Panne (all Imager members), “Dynamic Terrain Traversal Skills Using Reinforcement Learning”
  • February 2015:       Robert Bridson is the recipient of a technical achievement award from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for his work on 'early conceptualization of sparse-tiled voxel data structures and their application to modeling and simulation.' Bridson is being honoured for his ‘pioneering’ work in developing the algorithms and code behind fluid and smoke simulations used in a long string of major movies, including The Hobbit, Gravity and The Adventures of Tintin. Bridson's algorithms simulate the underlying physics of the phenomena that animation artists are trying to reproduce. By incorporating the laws of physics into computer modules, Bridson's research has helped everything from the mundane (Harry Potter’s cape flowing in the wind) to the fantastic (explosions and smoke in Hellboy II) follow the rules of nature and look realistic. Bridson helped develop the Naiad physical simulation software, used at studios around the world on films including Avatar, Narnia: Voyage of the Dawntreader, X-Men First Class, Harry Potter and The Deathly Hallows Part 2, Pirates of the Caribbean 4, Rise of the Planet of the Apes. An adjunct professor in the Department of Computer Science at UBC, Bridson has official screen credits for The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, The Adventures of Tintin, The Rise of the Planet of the Apes and Inkheart.
  • January 2015:       Peter Beshai (PhD student) creates Buckets, popular basketball shot visualization tool. Buckets is a tool that provides interactive visualizations of the shooting performance of all players in the NBA from the past four seasons. Various charts are used to depict variation in shooting frequency and shooting accuracy broken down by the location shots were taken from on the court. Users can explore individual players in detail, compare multiple players at once, and discover overall trends across the league. It was created as the final project in CPSC 547, a graduate course on Information Visualization.
  • October 2014:       Professors Alla Sheffer and Holger Hoos' paper, "Filling Your Shelves: Synthesizing Diverse Style-Preserving Artifact Arrangements", is chosen as the Novermber 2014 spotlight paper by IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics.
  • September 2014:       Professor Wolfgang Heidrich is elected the recipient of a Humboldt Research Award. This award is conferred to a researcher in recognition of his/her lifetime achievements in research and 'whose fundamental discoveries, new theories, or insights have had a significant impact on their own discipline'. The award winner is invited to carry out research projects of his/her own choice in cooperation with specialist colleagues in Germany to promote international scientific co-operation.
  • Sept 2014:       Welcome new students and post-docs!
  • Amadeusz Albert Wieczorek (MSc student, supervisor Tamara Munzner)
  • Yu Ju Chen, Taiwan (MSc student, supervisor Dinesh Pai)
  • I-Chao Shen, Taiwan (MSc student, supervisor Alla Sheffer)
  • Ben Janzen, Canada (MSc student, supervisor Kellogg Booth)
  • Robin Joseph Swanson (MSc student, supervisor Dinesh Pai)
  • Yan Zhao (MSc student, supervisor Alla Sheffer)
  • Michael Weingert (MSc student, supervisor Michiel van de Panne)
  • Cristin Ailidh Fraser (MSc student, supervisor Dinesh Pai)
  • Yujie Yang, China (MSc student, supervisor Joanna McGrenere)
  • Joao Afonso Liborio Cardoso, Portugal (MSc student, supervisor Dinesh Pai)
  • Sara Marie McCarthy (MSc student, supervisor Alla Sheffer)
  • Chengfeng Wen (MSc student, supervisor Alla Sheffer)
  • Glen Paul Berseth, Canada (PhD student, supervisor Michiel van de Panne)
  • Timothy Basil Luciani (PhD student, supervisor Tamara Munzner)
  • Michelle Borkin, USA (post-doc working remotely from Harvard, supervisor Tamara Munzner)
  • Sung-Hee Kim, Korea (post-doc, supervisor Joanna McGrenere)
  • Libin Liu, China (post-doc, supervisor Michiel van de Panne)
  • Marco Livesu, Italy (post-doc, supervisor Alla Sheffer)
  • Narges Mahyar (post-doc, supervisor Kellogg Booth)
  • April 2014:       Professor Dinesh Pai received an NSERC Idea to Innovation grant for developing realistic computer models of skin and skin-like materials, such as clothes. Modeling skin is of central importance in computer animation and in many areas of human health. The objective of the project is to create a high performance software library that could be used to simulate realistic skin movement. The software builds upon a recent breakthrough in Pai's group in simulating skin-like materials moving in close contact with the body.
  • February 2014:       Professor Alla Sheffer received an NSERC Idea to Innovation grant for developing tools for Automatic Hexahedral Meshing using PolyCubes. Quality automatic volumetric hexahedral, or cuboidal, mesh generation for generic 3D objects had been the holy grail of finite-element meshing since inception. A prototype hex-meshing algorithm developed by her lab makes significant advances toward this goal, generating better quality meshes for much wider range of inputs than any previous methodology. The goal of the funded research is to convert this preliminary prototype into a demo ready beta-version.
  • January 2014:       Ph.D. student Shailen Agrawal and Professor Michiel van de Panne won the best paper award at the Motion In Games 2013 Conference for their paper "Pareto Optimal Control for Natural and Supernatural Motions".
  • January 2014:       Ph.D student Shailen Agrawal, M.Sc. student Shou Shen, and Professor Michiel van de Panne were awarded a best-paper honorable mention at the ACM SIGGRAPH/EG Symposium on Computer Animation for their paper "Diverse Motion Variations for Physics-based Character Animation".
  • November 2013:       Prof. Dinesh Pai has been awarded a renewal of his CRC Tier 1 Chair in Sensorimotor Computation. Tier 1 CRCs are awarded to ''outstanding researchers acknowledged by their peers as world leaders in their fields.'' This award brings in $1.4M over the next 7 years to the Department of Computer Science and UBC.
  • Oct 2013:       The Peter Wall Institute has posted a link to a short film on Dinesh Pai’s work.
  • Sept 2013:       Welcome new MSc students!
  • Kamyar Ardekani, Iran (supervisor Joanna McGrenere)
  • Derek Cormier, Canada (supervisor Karon MacLean)
  • Francisco Javier Escalona Gonzalez, Mexico (supervisor Kellogg Booth)
  • Jolande Fooken, Germany (supervisor Dinesh Pai)
  • Russell Gillette, Canada (supervisor Alla Sheffer)
  • Darcy Harrison, Canada (supervisor Alla Sheffer)
  • Susanne Morrill, Canada (supervisor Dinesh Pai)
  • Yifan Peng, China (supervisor Wolfgang Heidrich)
  • Craig Peters, Canada (supervisor Alla Sheffer)
  • Michael Duy-Nam Phan-Ba, Canada (supervisor Karon MacLean)
  • Antoine Benoit Ponsard, France (supervisor Joanna McGrenere)
  • Anurag Ranjan, India (supervisor Dinesh Pai)
  • Alireza Shafaei, Iran (supervisor Karon MacLean)
  • Shuochen Su, China (supervisor Wolfgang Heidrich)
  • Christopher Thompson, Canada (supervisor Alla Sheffer)
  • Sept 2013:       Appeared: Special Issue of the Proceedings of the IEEE, co-edited by Karon MacLean.
  • PIEEE is the IEEE's flagship journal. This special issue is intended as a lay introduction by experts in the field to perceptual processing of information by haptics, vision and audition; accessible to any technical audience, and to be used as a graduate teaching resource.
  • Karam, L., Kleijn, B., & MacLean, K. (Eds.). (2013). Perception-based Media Processing. (101:9): Special Issue, Proceedings of the IEEE.
  • Table of Contents: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6582603
  • IEEE Explore: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/tocresult.jsp?isnumber=6582526
  • August 2013:       Alla Sheffer gave a keynote talk at the Canadian Computational Geometry Conference. More details here.
  • July 2013:       Michiel van de Panne gave a keynote talk at SCA 2013 (Symposium on Computer Animation). More details here .
  • April 2013:       Imager grad student Nicholas Vining, who moonlights as CTO of Gaslamp Games, discusses their latest development advances here.
  • April 2013:       Joanna McGrenere wins an MSR SEIF award for proposal on Adaptive Touch Targeting for Mobile Devices: Supporting Users Across the Adult Lifespan.
  • April 2013:       Tyson Brochu, Imager lab alum, has won the Alain Fournier award for best doctoral thesis in graphics in Canada this year for his work pioneering mesh-based fluid simulation in graphics, and related problems along the way.
  • Jan-Mar 2013:       HCI/Viz Research Talks at UBC by Beth Mynatt, Tony Tang, Gerhard Fischer, Colin Ware and Patrick Baudisch.

    Several seminars, colloquia, and other talks related to human-computer interaction (HCI) and Visualization will be taking place in early 2013 at UBC.

  • January 17, 3:30pm DMP 110: Beth Mynatt - Combining Computing, Design and Healthcare
  • February 4, 2:00pm, ICICS x836: Tony Tang - title TBA
  • February 27, 2:00 pm, ICICS x836: Gerhard Fischer - title TBA
  • March 7, 3:30pm, DMP 110: Colin Ware - Visual Thinking Algorithms
  • March 8, time and place TBA: Patrick Baudisch - title TBA
  • Jan 2013:       This Robotic Fur Patch is Cooler Than Your Cat, MIT Technology Review, Feb 8 2012, featuring recent UBC CS' SPIN Lab's Anna Flagg and Karon MacLean.
  • Jan 2013:       Prof. Doug James will receive an Academy Award (Oscar) for Technical Achievement on Feb 9, 2013.

    Doug received his Ph.D. (2001) at UBC in Applied Mathematics, supervised by Computer Science Professor Dinesh K. Pai. He continued as a postdoc at UBC Department of Computer Science until the summer of 2002 when he started a faculty position at Carnegie Mellon University. He is currently an Associate Professor in Computer Science at Cornell University.

  • Jan 2013:      ICICS has won a $10M NSERC CERC in "Digital Media Research and Innovation".   Recruiting opportunities coming, stay tuned.
  • Nov 2012:       Associate Professor Joanna McGrenere is the recipient of the 2012 Killam Award for Excellence in Mentoring.

    Joanna was commended for her exemplary record in providing supervision, inspiration and support for graduate students.

  • Nov 2012:       Imager conference papers accepted recently at Siggraph Asia, CHI, IUI, HRI, ICRA, WorldHaptics.
  • Libin Liu, KangKang Yin, Michiel van de Panne, Baining Guo, (Imager members: van de Panne), “Terrain Runner: Control, Parameterization, Composition, and Planning for Highly Dynamic Motion”
  • M. Bessmetsev, C. Wang, A. Sheffer, K. Singh, (Imager members: Bessmetsev, Sheffer), “Design-Driven Quadrangulation of Closed 3D Curves”.
  • Tam, MacLean, McGrenere, Kuchenbecker, “The Design and Field Observation of a Haptic Notification System for Timing Awareness During Oral Presentations,” in Proc. of ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI), Paris, 2013.
  • Gleeson, MacLean, Haddadi, Croft, Alcazar, “Gestures for Industry: Intuitive Human-Robot Communication from Human Observation,” in Proc. of ACM/IEEE Int'l Conf on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI), Tokyo, 2013.
  • Schneider, MacLean, Altun, Karuei, Wu, “Real-Time Gait Classification for Persuasive Smartphone Apps: Structuring the Literature and Pushing the Limits,” in Proc. of Int'l Conf in Intelligent User Interfaces (IUI), Santa Monica, 2013.
  • Seifi, MacLean, “Identifying Parameters for Affective Rating of Vibrations,” in Proc. of IEEE WorldHaptics, Daejon, S. Korea, 2013.
  • Haddadi, Croft, Gleeson., MacLean, Alcazar, “Analysis of Task-Based Gestures in Human-Robot Interaction,” in Proc. of IEEE Int'l Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), Karlsruhe, 2013.
  • Nov 2012:       Congratulations graduates!
  • PhD: Steve Yohanan (supervisor Karon MacLean)
  • MSc: Anna Flagg (Karon MacLean)
  • M.A.Sc.: Matthew Pan (Mech; Elizabeth Croft and Karon MacLean)
  • MSc: Oliver Schneider (Karon MacLean)
  • MSc.: Ian James South-Dickinson (Alla Sheffer)
  • MSc: Diane Tam (Joanna McGrenere and Karon MacLean).
  • Sept 2012:       Imager faculty member Robert Bridson recently sold his start-up company Exotic Matter (physics-based animation technology for visual effects) to Autodesk.
  • Sept 2012:       Imager welcomes new postdoc Chongyang Ma and visiting scholar Marco Livesu (both working with Alla Sheffer).
  • July 2012:       Imager has two papers in InfoVis '12: Sedlmair, Meyer & Munzner, and Sedlmair, Frank, Munzner & Butz.
  • July 2012:       Imager team Leung, Tang, Haddad and McGrenere have published a paper in Trans Accessible Computing - "How Older Adults Learn to Use Mobile Devices: Survey and Field Investigations".
  • June 2012:       Imager postdoc Matthias Hullin just received the Otto Hahn Medal for his PhD work.
  • June 2012:       Imager will present eight technical papers at SIGGRAPH 2012.
  • April 2012:       Imager alum Ron Maharik won the Faculty of Science Graduate Prize for his MSc record.
  • April 2012:       Imager members won the Best Student Paper (HCI Track) at Graphics Interface 2012 for "Individual Differences in Personal Task Management: A Field Study in an Academic Setting" by Mona Haraty, Diane Tam, Shathel Hadad, Joanna McGrenere, and Charlotte Tang.
  • April 2012:       Imager faculty Joanna McGrenere, Dinesh Pai, and Alla Sheffer received NSERC Discovery Accelerator Awards in the 2012 competition.
  • March 2012:       Imager alum Gordon Wetzstein won the Alain Fournier Ph.D. Dissertation Annual Award for 2011.
  • March 2012:       Imager faculty member Joanna McGrenere won a CACS/AIC Outstanding Young Canadian Computer Science Prize for 2011.
  • March 2012:       Vincent Levesque, Louise Oram and Karon MacLean win Best Paper at 2012 Haptics Symposium Karon MacLean's UBC-CS team (postdoc Vincent Levesque, now at Immersion Corp. and Master's student Louise Oram) win Best Paper award at the 2012 IEEE Haptics Symposium, held in Vancouver, March 4-7. Their paper, Exploring the Design Space of Programmable Friction for Scrolling Interactions, shows how novel interaction design methods can leverage new touchscreen technologies (like variable friction on glass surfaces) to make them more useful and informative.
  • March 2012:       Imager faculty Karon MacLean co-chairs the IEEE Haptics Symposium in Vancouver, on March 4-8. Drop by to see 50 demos of int'l cutting-edge research targeting the sense of touch, and much more.
  • February 2012:       Imager faculty Dinesh Pai will give the keynote talk at the ACM SIGGRAPH I3D conference this year.
  • January 2012:       Imager has four papers appearing at CHI 2012, part of eight from UBC.
  • January 2012:       Imager faculty Wolfgang Heidrich received the Charles McDowell Award for Excellence in Research, one of UBC's most presitigious research prizes.
  • January 2012:       PC World lists the programmable friction touch pad interaction techniques developed in Imager/SPIN as one of the top ten tech research projects from the past year. Watch the video here.
  • December 2011:       Imager faculty Alla Sheffer and collaborators win first prize in the 2011 International Audi Production Award competition, for their work on energy-efficient tool paths in CNC machining.
  • November 2011:       Congratulations to recent Imager graduates: Rock Leung and Gordon Wetzstein (PhD); Landon Boyd, Matthew Brehmer, Kai Ding, Gökhan Himmetoglu, Ben Jones, Ron Maharik, Amirhossein Mehrabian, Mohan Rajamanickam, Tao Su, and Suwen Wang (MSc).
  • October 2011:       The Adventures of Tintin includes Imager member Robert Bridson in its credits for R&D work done at Weta Digital during his recent stay in New Zealand.
  • October 2011:       Imager welcomes new postdoc Kerem Altun (with Karon MacLean). Kerem comes to us from Bilkent Unversity in Turkey. He received his PhD in Electrical Engineering, where he worked on intelligent sensing, sensor signal processing and fusion, human motion tracking and recognition, and system dynamics & control. In Imager lab, he'll work on gesture recognition and emotion modeling on our robot pet platform among other things.
  • September 2011:       Robert Bridson is featured in an FXGuide article on the science of fluid simulation for graphics.
  • September 2011:       Ph.D. student Sang Hoon Yeo and Professor Dinesh K. Pai, in collaboration with biologists in the US, shed new light on a long standing problem in biology: how our muscles actually work. The paper appears in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B: http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2011.1304
  • August 2011:       Sketching Haptics: a workshop by Camille Moussette (Umeå Institute of Design) with Karon MacLean. A fresh approach to quickly brainstorming and prototyping actuated movement, using Arduino microprocessing and quick-and-dirty hands-on methods. (August 12-17)
  • August 2011:       Rise of the Planet of the Apes includes Robert Bridson in the credits for R&D work from his recent stay at Weta Digital in New Zealand.
  • August 2011:       The Symposium on Computer Animation 2011 (co-chaired by Michiel van de Panne and Robert Bridson) was held at UBC at the start of August, just before SIGGRAPH.
  • July 2011:       The IEEE Haptics Symposium (co-chaired by Karon MacLean) in Vancouver, March 2012, released its first Call for Submissions.
  • July 2011:       Dinesh Pai is co-organizing the international workshop Multimodal and Sensorimotor Bionics in July in Munich, jointly between UBC and Technische Universitat Munchen.
  • July 2011:       Congratulations to seven Imager graduates (PhDs, MSc and postdocs) moving on to SAP, Google, Stanford, Microsfot, Inria, Nara Institute of Science and Technology.
    • Newly minted Doctorates are Shinjiro Sueda and Rock Leung. Rock will be managing the Academic Research Center at SAP North America.
    • Former postdoc Benjamin Gilles is now a Charge de Rechereche (permanent researcher) at INRIA in Montpellier, France. Former postdoc Atsutoshi Ikeda is now an Assistant Professor at Nara Institute of Science and Technology, Japan.
    • Recent Master's graduates include Andrej Karpathy (starting a summer internship at Google in Mountain View, then on to a Stanford PhD; Jennifer Fernquist (completing an Autodesk internship and moving on to Google; Gordon Chang is moving to Microsoft Redmond.
  • June 2011:       Imager welcomes three new postdocs this month: Brian Gleeson (with Karon MacLean), and Matthias Hullin and Emishaw Iffa (with Wolfgang Heidrich)
    • Brian Gleeson comes from University of Utah Mechanical Engineering where he worked on haptics and tactile perception. He'll work with Karon MacLean on human-robot interaction and industry partner General Motors, on the problem of bringing workers into direct collaborative contact with assembly line robots, currently prohibitively dangerous.
    • Matthias Hullin, formerly at Max-Planck-Institute for Computer Science, has joined Wolfgang's group as a post-doc. His PhD research at the Max Planck Institute for Informatics (Saarbrücken, Germany) tackled problems in the fields of graphics and vision that arise when common assumptions about light transport are violated. In particular, he developed a 3D scanning technique for "unscannable" materials such as glass (SIGGRAPH 2008), a data-driven reflectance model for fluorescent surfaces (SIGGRAPH 2010), and came up with a prototypical device that dynamically displays "materials" -- as opposed to "colours" -- by shaping the angular distribution of reflectance on its surface (Eurographics 2011). More recently, he's looked into real-time rendering of lens flare (SIGGRAPH 2011), and dabbled in HCI/ubiquitous computing with an ongoing project.
    • Emishaw Iffa has from Universiti Teknologi Petronas, Malaysia (Mechanical Engineering, especially fluid imaging) to work with Wolfgang Heidrich.
  • June 2011:       Imager welcomes two faculty visitors for a few weeks' stay: Dr. Andrea d'Avella, from the IRCCS Fondazione Santa Lucia in Rome, and Dr. Pierre-Brice Wieber from INRIA Rhone Alpes (Grenobles).
    • Dr. Pierre-Brice Wieber from INRIA Rhone Alpes (Grenobles) will be visiting us from June 8-18. His interests are in modeling, optimization, and control for humanoid motion. His control algorithms can be found in the Nao humanoid robot by Aldebaran Robotics.
    • Dr. Andrea d'Avella is hosted by Dinesh Pai. He is a Senior Research Scientist at the Laboratory of Neuromotor Physiology, IRCCS Fondazione Santa Lucia in Rome, Italy
  • May 2011:       Two recent Imager doctorates are recipients of Best Canadian dissertation awards in HCI and Computer Graphics - Stelian Coros (supervised by Michiel van de Panne) and Garth Shoemaker (supervised by Kelly Booth).
    • Stelian Coros, supervised by Michiel van de Panne, won the Alain Fournier Dissertation Award. The award is given annually to the best doctoral dissertation completed at a Canadian university in the field of Computer Graphics.
    • Garth Shoemaker, supervised by Kelly Booth, is the co-winner of the Bill Buxton Dissertation Award. Daniel Vogel from University of Toronto shares the award with Garth. The award is given to the best doctoral dissertation completed at a Canadian university in the field of Human-Computer Interaction.
  • May 2011:       Justine Cassell (Director of CMU's HCI Institute) gave an Imager Lab Colloquia - "The Human at the Heart of our Work: Advancing Social Theory and Engineering Practice", May 6.
  • March 2011:       Imager PhD student Gordon Wetzstein (with Heidrich) received the Best Paper award at the Int'l Conference for Computational Photography (ICCP)
  • April 2011:       Imager Lab has eight Siggraph papers accepted or conditionally accepted (~10% of the Siggraph papers program).
  • April 2011:       Kori Inkpen (Microsoft Research Labs, Redmond) gave an Imager Lab Colloquia: "Connecting Kids with Video", April 14.
  • April 2011:       Steven "Smlomo" Gortler (Robert I. Goldman Professor of Computer Science at Harvard University) gave an Imager Lab Colloquia: "Springs Springs Springs and Struts", April 12.
  • March 2011:       PhD student Steve Yohanan (with MacLean) received the Best Paper award at the ACM/IEEE Human Robot Interaction conference
  • March 2011:       NSERC awards $625K to trans-Canada team, including MacLean, for novel human-robot research to support advanced manufacturing at General Motors Canada.
    • Croft (UBC Mech) with MacLean and colleagues at Laval and McGill won a $625K Collaborative Research and Development Grant from NSERC for research that will let industrial robots "out of the cage" with close, physical interactions with human workers on General Motors' manufacturing floor.
  • March 2010:       Imager Lab (and a close friend) will have 3 full papers at Worldhaptics 2011 in Istanbul in June.
    • Perception of Sound Renderings via Vibrotactile Feedback. Pedrosa, R. ad MacLean, E.E., WHC'11
    • The Haptic Crayola Effect: Exploring the Role of Naming in Learning Haptic Stimuli. Hwang, I., MacLean, K. E., Brehmer, M., Hendy, J., Sotirakopoulos, A., and Choi, S., WHC'11.
    • Ef?acy of Shared-Control Guidance Paradigms for Robot-Mediated Training. Dane Powell (visitor in MacLean's lab), Marcia K. O'Malley, WHC'11
  • March 2011:       Brian Wyville (University of Victoria) delivered an Imager Lab Colloquia on March 4: "Implicit Modelling Past, Present and Future."
  • March 2011:       UBC Computer Science is hosting the ACM Siggraph Symposium on Computer Animation, 2011 SCA, Aug 5-7.
  • January 2011:       Imager student graduations: Garth Shoemaker obtained his PhD and is now working as a postdoc with Kelly Booth.
    • January 2011:       Mary Czerwinski (Microsoft Research) delivered a UBC-CS Distinguished Speaker seminar.
  • January 2011:       CS Undergraduate Student Research Competition: HCI undergraduates Juliette Link (supervised by McGrenere and Booth) and Louise Oram (by MacLean) tied for first place.
  • December 2010:       Imager Lab will have 4 full papers and 2 Interactivity Demos at CHI 2011, and one full paper at HRI 2011!
    • Design and Assessment of the Haptic Creature's Affect Display. Yohanan, S. and MacLean, K. E., HRI'11
    • Parameter Selection in Keyboard-Based Dialog Boxes. Hendy, J., Link, J., Booth, K.S., and McGrenere, J., CHI'11.
    • Enhancing Physicality in Touch Interaction with Programmable Friction. Levesque, V., Oram, L., MacLean, K. E., Cockburn, A., Marchuk, N., Johnson, D., Colgate, J. E., and Peshkin, M., CHI'11.
    • Now, Where Was I? Physiologically Triggered Bookmarks for Audio Books Pan, M. K. X. J., Chang, J.-S., Himmetoglu, G. H., Moon, A., Hazelton, T. W., MacLean, K. E., and Croft, E. A., CHI'11.
    • Detecting Vibrations across the Body in Mobile Contexts, Karuei, I., MacLean, K. E., Foley-Fisher, Z., Mackenzie, R., Koch, S., and El-Zohairy, M., CHI'11.
  • November 2010:       Imager student graduations: Stelian Coros successfully defended his PhD thesis with Michiel van de Panne and will soon start a two year postdoc at Disney / ETH in Zurich.
  • November 2010:       Imager postdoc Nicolas Bonneel won best paper award at the VIsion, Modeling, and Visualization 2010 (VMV 2010) held recently in Germany, for the paper Proxy-Guided Texture Synthesis for Rendering Natural Scenes.
  • October 2010:       Tamara Munzner and other participants on the Perspectives on Teaching Data Visualization panel won Best Panel award at VisWeek 2010.
  • September 2010:       Imager welcomes two new postdocs - Charlotte Tang, working with Joanna McGrenere, and Michael Sedlmair, with Joanna McGrenere.
  • September 2010:       Imager faculty sabbaticals: Robert Bridson is at Weta in New Zealand for the year, and Alla Sheffer is at INRIA in France.
  • September 2010:       Imager faculty sabbaticals: Robert Bridson is at Weta in New Zealand for the year, and Alla Sheffer is at INRIA in France.
  • September 2010:       Wolfgang Heidrich and Karon Maclean are now promoted to full professors, and Robert Bridson is now an associate professor.
  • September 2010:       Imager student graduations: Derek Bradley has finished a PhD with Wolfgang Heidrich and is now a postdoc at Disney Research Zurich, Christopher Batty has finished a PhD with Robert Bridson, and Jen Fernquist and Russ MacKenzie have finished their MScs with Kelly Booth.
  • September 2010:       A new 8-camera Vicon mocap system has just arrived, as part of the ICICS Human Sensorimotor Systems theme.
  • May 2010: Graduated Imager PhD student Tiberiu Popa received the Alain Fournier Award for the best Canadian Computer Graphics Dissertation in 2009. Congratulations, Tibi!
  • April 2010: The Siggraph 2010 paper acceptances are out, and Imager researchers have had a pretty good year. The list of the papers we have contributed to is:
    • Coded Aperture Projection (TOG Paper) Max Grosse, (Bauhaus-Universitat Weimar), Gordon Wetzstein (University of British Columbia), Anselm Grundhofer (Bauhaus-Universitat Weimar), Oliver Bimber (Bauhaus-Universitat Weimar and Johannes Kepler University Linz)
    • High Resolution Passive Facial Performance Capture Derek Bradley, Wolfgang Heidrich, Tiberiu Popa, Alla Sheffer (University of British Columbia)
    • Matching Fluid Simulation Elements to Surface Geometry and Topology Tyson Brochu, Christopher Batty, Robert Bridson (University of British Columbia)
    • Sampling-based Contact-rich Motion Control Libin Liu, KangKang Yin (Microsoft Research Asia), Michiel van de Panne (University of British Columbia), Tianjia Shao, Weiwei Xu (Microsoft Research Asia)
    • Generalized Biped Walking Control Stelian Coros, Philippe Beaudoin, Michiel van de Panne (University of British Columbia)
  • April 2010: NSERC scholarships are awarded to Imager students Farbod Roosta-Khorasani (Graphics), James Gregson (Graphics), Russ MacKenzie (HCI) and Jonathan Chang (HCI). Congratulations!
  • April 2010: Imager faculty member Joanna McGrenere was appointed an Early Career: Scholar at the Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies.
  • April 2010: Imager faculty members Michiel van de Panne and Wolfgang Heidrich both received an NSERC Discovery Accelerator Supplement. The objective of the NSERC DAS is to provide "substantial and timely additional resources to accelerate progress and maximize the impact of outstanding research programs". There were 12 DAS recipients in Computer Science across Canada.
  • February 2010: Avatar wins six VES awards, including single best visual effect of 2009; Weta Digital used software co-developed by Imager faculty member Robert Bridson to simulate water in that scene and elsewhere in the film.
  • December 2010: GRAND NCE hosted by Imager's Kellog Booth: UBC to host National New Media and Animation Research Network.
  • December 2010: Imager members presented three papers at Siggraph Asia 2009 on task control, deformable models, and geometry abstraction.
  • August 2009: Imager faculty member Robert Bridson helps unveil start-up company he cofounded, Exotic Matter, developing software for physics-based animation in film visual effects. (more)
  • April 2009: Imager faculty member Joanna McGrenere and her students Leah Findlater, Karyn Moffatt, and Jessica Dawson win Best Paper at CHI 2009 for their work on ephemeral adaptation.
  • March 2009: Imager faculty members receive prestigious UBC awards: Ron Rensink is awarded the Killam Research Prize in Arts and Alla Sheffer is awarded a Killam Faculty Research Fellowship. (more)
  • January 2009: Work by Imager faculty Robert Bridson and Imager alumni Yongning Zhu and Brent Williams is featured in CGWorld magazine next month, concerning its use for visual effects in last summer's film Hell Boy II: The Golden Army
  • December 2008 Imager researchers have another great run of papers at a major conference. Lab members contributed to 6 projects presented at the first Siggraph Asia conference, located in Singapore:
  • October 20, 2008:       Dolby Laboratories, and the University of British Columbia announced the establishment of the Dolby Research Chair in Computer Science for Dr. Wolfgang Heidrich. The Chair will support Dr. Heidrich's research program in high dynamic range (HDR) displays, cameras, and image processing algorithms, as well as perceptual studies in HDR and related technologies.
  • August 2008:       Imager Faculty Robert Bridson's first book, on fluid simulation, sells out at SIGGRAPH. Bridson also co-wrote fluid simulation software for Double Negative Visual Effects that was used in movies The Dark Knight and Hell Boy II: The Golden Army.
  • July 2008:       Imager Faculty Joanna McGrenere and Alla Sheffer are promoted to the rank of Associate Professor.
  • June 2008       The following Imager students received graduate fellowships for 2008—2009:
    • Christopher Batty, NSERC CGS-D (continuing)
    • Derek Bradley, NSERC CGS-D (continuing)
    • Tyson Brochu, NSERC PGS-D
    • Stelian Coros, NSERC CGS
    • Peter McLachlan, NSERC PGS-D (continuing)
    • Allan Rempel, UBC Pacific Century Graduate Scholarship
    • Cody Robson, UBC UGF
    • Garth Shoemaker, NSERC PGS-D (continuing), DRDC NSERC Supplement (continuing)
    • Gordon Wetzstein, UBC UGF
    • Mark Wiebe, Julie Payette-NSERC Research Scholarship
    • James Zhou, NSERC PGS-M
  • June 2008:       Alla Sheffer receives the UBC Computer Science Incredible Instructor award for spring 2007.
  • May 2008:       Former Imager graduate student Abhijeet Ghosh receives the Alain Fournier Award for the best Canadian Computer Graphics Dissertation. The award committee specifically cited Abhijeet's outstanding research contributions to computer graphics, as well as his leadership in the research community and the home university. Congratulations, Abhijeet!
  • Apr 2008:       The Siggraph 2008 paper acceptances are out, and Imager researchers have had a phenomenal year. Here is a list of the seven papers we have contributed to:
  • Apr 2008:       Wolfgang Heidrich presents an invited lecture entitled "Bringing High Dynamic Range to your Living Room" at the Spring Conference on Computer Graphics in Budmerice, Slovakia.
  • Mar 2008:       Imager PhD student Mario Enriquez and faculty member Karon MacLean win the Best Haptics Science Paper Award at the 2008 Haptics Symposium for "The Role of Choice in Longitudinal Recall of Meaningful Tactile Signals".
  • Nov 2007:       Dinesh Pai is awarded a 3-year $500,000 Major Thematic Grant on "Sensorimotor Computation" from the Peter Wall Institute.
  • Nov 2007:       Three Imager graphics PhDs convocate in the November graduation ceremony: KangKang Yin, Abhijeet Ghosh, and Vladislav Kraevoy. Abhijeet Ghosh has jointed the USC Institute for Creative Technologies. KangKang Yin and Vladislav Kraevoy are staying on as post-doctoral fellows. Welcome again!
  • Nov 2007:       Imager PhD student KangKang Yin completed an internship this summer at Honda Research America in Mountain View, California.
  • Nov 2007:       Philippe Beaudoin from the Universite de Montreal will soon be joining us soon as a postdoctoral fellow. Welcome!
  • Nov 2007:       Michiel van de Panne gives an invited talk for the Theoretical and Applied Mechanics seminar at Cornell University: "Simple Controllers for Flexible, Balance-aware Biped Motions".
  • Nov 2007:      PhD student Christopher Batty receives a 2-year NSERC CGS scholarship.
  • Nov 2007      Tamara Munzner is awarded a US$50,000 grant from AT&T Research.
  • Oct 2007      Tamara Munzner is awarded a US$50,000 grant from Google.
  • Oct 2007      PhD Student Karyn Moffatt and Imager faculty member Joanna McGrenere win the 2007 ACM SIGACCESS Best Student Paper Award for their paper "Slipping and Drifting: Using Older Users to Uncover Pen-based Target Acquisition Difficulties".
  • Oct 2007       Imager faculty member Tamara Munzner, UBC CS faculty member Nando de Freitas, UVic faculty and former Imager postdoc Melanie Tory, and SFU faculty member Torsten Möller are awarded a 3-year NSERC Strategic Grant ($489,648) for "Visually Enhanced Exploration of High-Dimensional Data", with industrial partners Broadband TV, Enquisite, and Worio.
  • Oct 18, 2007      An Imager research team comprised of former PhD student Abhijeet Ghosh, former M.Sc student Shruthi Achutha, former B.Sc student Matthew O'Toole, and faculty member Wolfgang Heidrich wins a Marr Prize Honorable Mention at ICCV 2007 for their work on Basis Function BRDF Measurement.
  • Sep 20, 2007       Former Imager PhD student Abhijeet Ghosh joins the Graphics Lab at the Institute for Creative Technologies at USC as permanent research staff.
  • Aug 2007       Michiel van de Panne is program co-chair (with Eric Saund, PARC) of the 2007 Eurographics Workshop on Sketch-Based Interfaces and Modeling, held in Riverside, California on August 3,4.
  • Aug 8, 2007:       Eric Brochu and Nando de Freitas from the LCI Lab, and Imager PhD Candidate Abhijeet Ghosh win the ACM Student Research Competition (SRC) at SIGGRAPH 2007 for their poster on "Preference Galleries for Material Design".
  • Jul 2007       PhD student Tiberiu Popa received a Pacific Century Graduate Scholarship for the 07-08 academic year.
  • Jul 4, 2007:       Daniel Cohen-Or from Tel Aviv University joins Imager for a 1-year sabbatical stay.
  • May 2, 2007:       Imager will present 4 papers at ACM SIGGRAPH 2007. All of the papers are first-authored by UBC students or faculty.
  • Apr 22-27, 2007:      Imager faculty Dinesh Pai and Wolfgang Heidrich deliver two of six keynotes at the Dagstuhl seminar Visual Computing: Convergence of Computer Graphics and Computer Vision. Pai talks on "Visual Computing in Sensorimotor Biology", while the title of Heidrich's talk is "Towards a High Dynamic Range Imaging Pipeline".
  • Apr 25, 2007:      It is now official: BrightSide Technologies, the UBC spinoff company that commercializes the high dynamic range image technology that many Imager members have contributed to, has been sold to Dolby Labs. BrightSide is now Dolby Canada and will continue its imaging research and development in Vancouver. Imager is looking forward to continuing collaborations with the Dolby Canada Team.
  • Apr 1, 2007:      Former Imager PhD student Roger Tam starts in the UBC Department of Radiology as an Assistant Professor.
  • Mar 2007      PhD student Peter McLachlan is awarded a 3-year NSERC PGS fellowship.
  • Mar 11, 2007:      Wolfgang Heidrich delivers a keynote address on "High Dynamic Range Imaging and Display" at the GRAPP (Graphics Theory and Applications) and VISAPP (Vision Theory and Applications) conferences in Barcelona, Spain.
  • Mar 1, 2007:       Wolfgang Heidrich enters a collaborative research agreement with NVIDIA. Heidrich and Imager graduate student Gordon Wetzstein will work closely with David Luebke from NVIDIA Research on novel imaging and display technology. NVIDIA will support the UBC activities with US$38,000.
  • Jan 2007       Imager faculty member Tamara Munzner is awarded a US$25,000 grant from Agilent Labs.
  • Jan 2007:       PhD student Andrea Bunt, together with her co-supervisors Joanna McGrenere and Cristina Conati, win best paper at the Intelligent User Interfaces Conference (IUI) for their paper on Supporting Interface Customization Using a Mixed-Initiative Approach
  • Dec 7, 2006:      Imager PhD student Allan Rempel wins an NSERC/MITACS Industrial Postgraduate Scholarship with BrightSide Technologies.
  • November 2006:       Imager faculty member Alla Sheffer and UBC CS faculty member James Little receive a GEOIDE NCE grant to investigate Extraction of Terrain and Vegetation Layers from LIDAR Data.
  • Nov 2006:       Dinesh Pai joins Imager as a faculty member and Canada Research Chair, with interests in computer graphics, animation and simulation, and sensori-motor computation. Welcome Dinesh! This brings us to 6 faculty with interests related to computer graphics, animation, and visualization. Current faculty, postdocs, and graduate students have authored or co-authored a total of 21 SIGGRAPH papers during 2000-2006. In the past four years, Imager faculty have co-chaired the premiere conferences that are specific to information visualization (InfoVis), geometric modeling (SGP), rendering (EGSR), and animation (SCA).
  • Oct 2006:      Imager PhD students Cheryl Lau, Andrea Bunt, and Mario Enriquez win Precarn Scholarships.
  • Oct 26, 2006:       Wolfgang Heidrich speaks in the newly established Computer Science Faculty Talk series, and presents results from multi-disciplinary research on high dynamic range imaging and display, conducted in Imager, UBC Physics and Astronomy, and UBC spinoff company Brightside Technologies. Hardware and algorithms developed during this collaborative effort have significant potential to impact the $20+ billion dollar world-wide market for televisions and monitors.
  • Oct 16, 2006:       Imager masters student Zephyr Zhangbo Liu was one of the first 25 contestants to 100% correctly complete all of the challenges in Part 2 of the IBM Master the Mainframe Contest. He also completed Part 1 of the contest. According to IBM, he cranked through those challenges impressively fast -- nice work! He wins a 4GB iPOD nano and would like to thank Prof. Kelly Booth for his support and encouragement. Unfortunately, he's too busy to enter Part 3. Find out more.
  • Oct 13, 2006:       Imager hosts visitor Malcolm Slaney of Yahoo! Research, speaking on "The 3Rs of Internet Multimedia: Recommendations, Relevance, and Replicas"
  • Oct 3, 2006:      Ivo Ihrke from the Max-Planck-Institut für Informatik is visiting the lab. He will stay until the end of November to work on a Siggraph project with Bradley Atcheson and Wolfgang Heidrich. Welcome!
  • Sep 8, 2006:      Tamy Boubekeur, Xavier Granier, Christophe Schlick (all from LaBRI/INRIA Futurs, Bordeaux), and Imager faculty member Wolfgang Heidrich win the Eurographics 2006 Günter Enderle Award, as well as the Eurographics Best Student Paper Award for their paper "Volume-Surface Trees" on research conducted during Tamy's visit at UBC during the summer of 2005.
  • Sep 2006:      Florence Bertails joins us as a postdoc. She has recently completed her PhD thesis on the simulation of virtual hair, part of which was presented in a SIGGRAPH 2006 paper on using Super Helices for predicting the dynamics of natural hair. Welcome Florence!
  • Fall 2006:      PhD students Leah Findlater and Karyn Moffatt interning at IBM Toronto Lab and IBM TJ Watson
  • Aug 2006:       Generalized Cylinder rendering technique developed by Ivan Neulander and Imager faculty member Michiel van de Panne (GI'98 paper) is used as basis for hair rendering in "The Chronicles of Narnia", as presented in a SIGGRAPH 2006 course.
  • Jul 14, 2006:       Karon MacLean and Joseph Luk featured in New Scientist story "Gadgets get the feel of the tactile world"
  • Jul 1, 2006:       Imager PhD student and postdoctoral fellow Dr. Barry Po has joined Cogneto, a company specializing if authentication technology, as Director of User Experience under a two-year NSERC Industrial R&D Fellowship. He joints former Imager/LCI alumnus Dr. Andrew Csinger, the Chief Strategy Officer for Cogneto.
  • Jun 26-28, 2006:       The Eurographics Symposium on Geometry Processing, co-chaired by Imager faculty member Alla Sheffer, is taking place in Cagliari, Sardinia.
  • Jun 26-28, 2006:       The Eurographics Symposium on Rendering, co-chaired by Imager faculty member Wolfgang Heidrich, is taking place in Nicosia, Cyprus.
  • Jun 2006:       The ABF++ algorithm co-authored by Alla Sheffer is included in the most recent release of the Blender open-source modeler.
  • May 2006:       Imager faculty member Alla Sheffer joins MITACS NCE "Mathematical Surface Representations for Conceptual Design" project as a Co-PI.
  • Jun 2006:       Joanna McGrenere wins IBM Faculty Award
  • May 2006:       PhD student Vladislav Kraevoy receives UBC UGF award
  • Apr 2006:       Imager faculty member Kelly Booth wins Faculty of Science Achievement Award, UBC, April 2006.
  • Apr, 2006:       Imager Lab presents 4 full papers (including Best paper) at ACM CHI Conference (Montreal) and runs a 2-day workshop on cognitive technologies. Joseph Luk, Karon MacLean and McGill collaborators win Best Paper at CHI 2006, for their paper "Haptics as a Solution for Mobile Interaction Challenges: Initial Design Using a Handheld Tactile Display Prototype", which presents a completely new haptic display modality and lessons on how to design the language it speaks.
  • Apr 1, 2006       Imager NSERC postdoctoral fellow Dr. Melanie Tory has joined the Department of Computer Science at the University of Victoria as an assistant professor.
  • Apr 1, 2006       NSERC has awarded a Research Tools and Instrumentation Grant ($113,000) for a "Direct Multi-Touch Interaction for a Very Large Wall Display" to Dr. Kellogg Booth, Alla Sheffer, Michiel van de Panne, and four other UBC collaborators. Industrial partner SMART Technologies Inc. (Calgary AB) is contributing $25,000 to the project that will develop a 16' by 9' interactive wall display that will be used to develop new interaction techniques for group collaboration.
  • Mar, 2006:       Imager grad students Colin Swindells, Evgeny Maksakov and supervisor Karon MacLean are runner up for Best Paper at the IEEE Haptics Symposium in Washington DC for their paper "The Role of Prototyping Tools for Haptic Behavior Design", featuring an interactive tool for creating, exploring and teaching haptic renderings of dynamic physical models.
  • Mar 3, 2006:       Derek Bradley wins a 3 year Canada Graduate Scholarship (CGS-D) from NSERC. Congratulations, Derek!
  • Mar 2006:       NIH/NSF Visualization Research Challenges Report published, co-authored by Imager faculty member Tamara Munzner.
  • Jan 2006:       Alla Sheffer receives IBM Faculty Award
  • Oct, 2005:       Imager students submit a paper on a course project and win Best Paper at the ACM International Conference on Multimodal Interfaces (ICMI '06) in Trento, Italy (course: CPSC 543 Physical interfaces, taught by Karon MacLean). All the other course projects, lead by other Imager students, got accepted as papers too! See SPIN lab publications
  • Oct 2005:       PhD students Andrea Bunt and Matthew Trentacoste win Precarn Scholarships
  • Sep 2005:       Karyn Moffatt wins an NSERC PGS-D
  • May 2005:       AI/GI/CRV 2005 takes place in Victoria BC. Imager faculty member Kelly Booth serves as general chair; Imager faculty member Michiel van de Panne serves as program co-chair for GI 2005.
  • Apr 2005:       Joanna McGrenere and Karon MacLean are awarded a TLEF grant for Team Based Learning and Studio Methods in Computer Science. Funds are being used towards a state of the art teaching studio and curriculum for Human Computer Interaction.
  • Apr 2005:       Joanna McGrenere, together with Drs. Peter Graf and Maria Klawe awarded a CIHR grant to investigate Technology Usability Across the Adult Lifespan

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