VAST 2005 Symposium - Keynote Speakers


Keynote Speakers


Keynote Talk 1:

PAUL DEBEVEC
ASSISTANT PROFESSOR AT USC AND DIRECTOR OF THE USC ITC GRAPHIC LAB


Photometric Realism: Accurate Reflectance Modeling of Sites and Artifacts

Wednesday 9TH November, 2005. 09:30 - 10:30.
ISTI-CNR, Pisa, Italy.

While many 3D scanning techniques can accurately record the geometry of sites and artifacts, a subject's reflectance properties are often simplistically recorded as an RGB texture map. In reality, each point in a subject's volume scatters incident illumination according to a complex 4D phase function unique to itself, yielding far richer reflectance behaviors than traditional texture acquisition techniques are able to model. A goal for digital documentation should be to record and render - in any illumination - the full gamut of diffuse, specular, translucent reflectance properties of the site or artifact ranging from wood, clay, precious metals, paints, skins, glass, and jewels. In this talk I will present three recently developed techniques in pursuit of this goal. The first is the light stage, a device which captures spatially-varying light scattering properties of artifacts by illuminating them from a dense array of lighting directions. The second is linear light source reflectometry, a low-cost process that uses a translational pass of an inexpensive neon tube light to capture the reflectance properties of a planar artifact such as a daguerreotype or an illuminated manuscript. Finally, I will present an environmental reflectometry process based on inverse global illumination designed developed to digitize the geometry and reflectance properties of the Parthenon on the Athenian Acropolis and to virtually reunite it with its sculptures in the British Museum.

Speaker Biography

Paul Debevec is a research assistant professor at the University of Southern California (USC) and directs the graphics laboratory at USC's Institute for Creative Technologies. His 1996 Ph.D. thesis at UC Berkeley presented Facade, an image-based modeling and rendering system for creating photoreal architectural models from photographs. He subsequently developed techniques for illuminating computer-generated scenes with real-world lighting captured through high dynamic range photography, demonstrating new image-based lighting techniques in his animations "Rendering with Natural Light", "Fiat Lux", and "The Parthenon". He also led the design of HDR Shop, the first widely-used high dynamic range image editing program. Debevec's recent work has produced several light stage devices that allow objects, actors, and performances to be synthetically illuminated with novel lighting, recently used to create photoreal digital actors for the 2004 film "Spider-Man 2". Debevec received ACM SIGGRAPH's first Significant New Researcher Award in 2001.


Keynote Talk 2:

KENT R. WEEKS
PROFESSOR OF EGYPTOLOGY AND DIRECTOR OF THE THEBAN MAPPING PROJECT


The Theban Mapping Project: Website, Databases, and Research

Thursday 10TH November, 2005. 11:30 - 12:30.
ISTI-CNR, Pisa, Italy.

For twenty years, the Theban Mapping Project has been preparing detailed maps and plans of the tombs in Egypt's Valley of the Kings. As a part of that work, it discovered KV 5, a tomb for the many sons of Pharaoh Rameses II, and the largest tomb ever found in Egypt. The project's survey and excavation work are regularly reported on its website, www.kv5.com, and archived in a series of archaeological and photographic databases. The website currently receives over 6 million hits each month, and its databases have become the standard reference for all archaeological work at Thebes. This paper will review the development of these resources, and outline the ways in which the breadth of their coverage has been combined with great depth to create resources accessible to an audience ranging from school children to professional Egyptologists.

Speaker Biography

Kent R. Weeks received his B.A. in anthropology and archaeology from the University of Washington and his Ph.D. in Egyptology from Yale University. He has worked at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the University of Chicago, the University of California, Berkeley, and the American University in Cairo. The recepient of many awards for teaching, publication, and research, he is honorary member of many academic societies around the world.


Keynote Talk 3

DIETER W. FELLNER
PROFESSOR AT INSTITUTE OF COMPUTER GRAPHICS AND KNOWLEDGE VISUALIZATION
GRAZ UNIVERSITY OF TECHNOLOGY, AUSTRIA


Digital Preservation of Cultural Heritage:
When the Acquisition Part will be under control -- what's the Next Grand Challenge?


Friday 10TH November, 2005. 11:00 - 12:00.
ISTI-CNR, Pisa, Italy.

Digital Libraries (DLs) in general and Preservation of Cultural Heritage applications in particular typically offer a rich set of multimedia objects like audio, music, images, videos, and 3D models. But instead of handling these objects consistently as regular documents -- in the same way we handle text documents -- most applications handle them differently.
This is due to the fact that 'standard' tasks like content categorization, indexing, content representation or summarization have not yet been developed to a stage where DL technology could readily apply it for these types of documents. Instead, these tasks have to be done manually making the activity almost prohibitively expensive.
Consequently, once the acquisition technology has matured to a level robustly meeting the demands of the respective applications the most pressing RTD challenge is the development of an adequate (non-textual) 'vocabulary' to characterize the content and structure of non-textual documents as the key to indexing, categorization, dissemination and access.
Phrased differently, we need a new generation of vocabularies we define the metadata in. Currently, many items on the metadata activity list just hide the fact that we have a serious deficit in the underlying technology! Also, one could argue that metadata just consisting of textual elements will not be an adequate basis for metadata of higher-dimensional objects.
The issue can be illustrated by the following example: if we just do a 2D scan of a sheet of paper with text on it we get millions of pixels without any structure and, of course, without any semantic meaning. Only after having done the (automated) optical character reccognition (OCR) we have an alphabet we can work with and we can take the next step which is the (automated) metadata extraction.
In this example, characters and strings are the right search terms to be used. For objects in higher dimensions, like images or 3D objects, we just don't know yet which elements resemble the low-level alphabet from which we can build the 'right' vocabulary then to be used for metadata, for indexing objects, for compactly describing the content, for specifying access, ...
In addition to motivating the RTD challenge the presentation will show some first results of this approach for 3D documents.

Speaker Biography

Dieter Fellner is a professor of computer science at the Graz University of Technology and head of the newly established Institute of Computer Graphics and Knowledge Visualization. Previously he has held academic positions at the Technical University Braunschweig, Germany (1998-2005), the University of Bonn, Germany (92-98), the Memorial University of Newfoundland, Canada (88-92), and the University of Denver, Colorado (85). He received his M.S. (Dipl.-Ing.) and his Ph.D. (Dr. Techn.) from the University of Technology in Graz, Austria in 1981 and 1984, respectively.
His main research and project areas over the years were formal languages, telematic services, user interface design, software engineering, digital libraries, e-learning, and, of course, computer graphics. He is currently engaged in research projects focusing on the architectural side of graphics and modelling systems with regard to efficiency and reusability, immersive systems and virtual reality, as well as on multimedia systems with a focus on the general concept of electronic documents and digital libraries, where he has coordinated a strategic research initiative funded by the German Research Foundation DFG (1997-2005).
He is Chairman of Graphics Chapter of the German Computer Society (GI Fachbereich Graphische Datenverarbeitung), member of the editorial board of Computer Graphics Forum, Computers & Graphics, IEEE Computer Graphics & Applications, J.UCS and Journal of Digital Libraries, member of the board of series editors of the EUROGRAPHICS Workshop Series, referee for a number of journals and research organizations, and program committee member of a number of international conferences. He was also Programme Co-Chair of the Eurographics’97 and Eurographics’2003 conference.
He is a member of EUROGRAPHICS, ACM, IEEE Computer Society and GI.