Contact
E-Mail Address: spattija@gmail.com, marco.dibenedetto@isti.cnr.it
Office Address: Via G. Moruzzi, n.1 - 56124 - Pisa (PI) - Italy
Office Location: Building B, Gate 7, Floor 1, Room I-54
Office Phone: +39 050 621 2921
Office Fax: +39 050 315 2810

Marco Di Benedetto, Ph.D.

Cofounder of Transform & Lighting S.r.l.

Cofounder of SEEMsome Everyone Ltd.

Researcher at the Visual Computing Laboratory (VC)
Istituto di Scienza e Tecnologie dell'Informazione "Alessandro Faedo" (ISTI)
Area della Ricerca di Pisa, Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche (CNR)



Short Bio

TL;DR
I like computers, everything about them. That's mostly why I took a Ph.D. from the University of Pisa. My hobby is Computer Graphics. Incidentally, it's my research job. My main goal is to achieve a good quality, real-time visualization of complex scenes, both on powerful workstations and on off-the-shellfs smartphones.

Download my full CV here.

A bit more romance
My parents told me my first word was "luce" (light). They also told me that when I was three years old, I was literally frozen at staring behind a window of a wedding-dress shop, and didn't want to move. "Do you like it?", they asked. "Yeeesss!", I answered. "That's a bride dress, used in weddings, what would you do with it?", they continued. "Nooo, I want this!". I was pointing at the spot light hardware illuminating that dress.
My early times were about fighting to obtain things dangerous to a child. Nonetheless, I somehow managed to obtain them. Well, some of them. Italian elementary and mid school cycles passed. With complete freedom and encouragement by my parents, I attended scientific italian high school, I took a diploma, and then attended that place known as the Department of Computer Science at University of Pisa. There I found professors that did not continue teaching until every single student had understood the previous topic. With those professors and passionate collegues, I truly understood what reasoning, understanding, and practicing mean. There I took my BS and MS degrees.
My MS thesis on the first fully conformal and efficient implementation of the OpenGL|ES specifications was advisored both by academy figures, as my internal advisors Giuseppe Attardi and Paolo Cignoni, and external industry subjects, namely STMicroelectronics.
Just after my MS, I had the chance of joining Paolo's research group, the Visual Computing Lab. Since the beginning, they tried to convince me I had to embrace a Ph.D. student career. At first I refused. Then, after working with him and others from the lab, especially Fabio Ganovelli, our research director Roberto Scopigno, and our president and former lab founder Claudio Montani, I realized I was actually doing science, and I was doing it with people at the boundary of knowledge as my mentors. So I started my Ph.D journey.
I focused on real-time rendering of huge terrain and urban models, as well as GPU techniques and web technologies. My research work led me to my Ph.D. thesis entitled "Multiresolution Techniques for Real-Time Visualization of Urban Environments and Terrains", where I talk about how you can visualize our huge world with a commodity, off-the-shellfs computer.

I am continuing my work on real-time rendering and web fruition as my research work, check out my publications and links!

Aside those main topics, I am quite interested in computer vision, robotics, physics, drums playing, motor bykes, and food.


Education

Here is a list of my most important official educational milestones:

  • Diploma (High School Degree) from Liceo Scientifico "Leonardo" in 1998, with a grade of 60/60
  • Laurea di Primo Livello (BS) in Computer Science from Università di Pisa in 2003, with a grade of 110/110
  • Laurea Specialistica (MS) in Computer Science from Università di Pisa in 2005, with a grade of 110/110 Magna Cum Laude
  • Dottorato di Ricerca (Ph.D.) in Computer Science from Università di Pisa in 2011
I cannot list the unofficial educational milestones because they occur just everyday.


Research

My research is focused on advanced rendering techniques on modern Graphics Processing Units (GPUs). In particular, multiresolution techniques for data representation and real–time rendering of large datasets, resembling both single objects (e.g., 3D scanned models), and large environments, like terrains and urban areas. The related studies and implementations allowed the development of interactive exploration applications that, thanks to streaming techniques and WebGL-based software systems, can be also used on the web platform. The advanced use of the parallel architecture offered by modern GPUs has moreover allowed the creation of photorealistic rendering algorithms for complex materials.

Ph.D. Thesis

My Ph.D. thesis, entitled "Multiresolution Techniques for Real-Time Visualization of Urban Environments and Terrains", can be downloaded [here] (link coming soon...).

SpiderGL

I am the creator and main developer of SpiderGL, a JavaScript library for 3D on the web. Don't be scared of spiders, embrace them :)

Awards


Publications

The list of my publications can also be found on the Visual Computing Lab publication page here.

International Journals

  • Marco Di Benedetto, Fabio Ganovelli, marcos balsa Rodriguez, Alberto Jaspe Villanueva, Enrico Gobbetti, and Roberto Scopigno
    eXploreMaps: Efficient Construction and Ubiquitous Exploration of Panoramic View Graphcs of Complex 3D Environments
    Computer Graphics Forum, 33(2), 2014 [link]
  • Frederic Larue, Marco Di Benedetto, Matteo Dellepiane, and Roberto Scopigno
    From the Digitization of Cultural Artifacts to the Web Publishing of Digital 3D Collections: an Automatic Pipeline for Knowledge Sharing
    Journal of Multimedia, 7(2):132–144, May 2012 [link]
  • Daniele Bernabei, Ajit Hakke Patil, Francesco Banterle, Marco Di Benedetto, Fabio Ganovelli, Sumanta Pattanaik, and Roberto Scopigno
    A Parallel Architecture for Interactive Rendering of Scattering and Refraction Effects
    IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications, 2011 [link]
  • Paolo Cignoni, Marco Di Benedetto, Fabio Ganovelli, Enrico Gobbetti, Fabio Marton, and Roberto Scopigno
    Ray-Casted BlockMaps for Large Urban Models Visualization
    Computer Graphics Forum, 26(3):405–413, September 2007 [link]
  • Enrico Gobbetti, Fabio Marton, Paolo Cignoni, Marco Di Benedetto, and Fabio Ganovelli
    CBDAM – Compressed Batched Dynamic Adaptive Meshes for Terrain Rendering
    Computer Graphics Forum, 25(3):333–342, September 2006 [link]

International Conferences

  • Enrico Gobbetti, Fabio Marton, Marcos Balsa Rodriguez, Fabio Ganovelli, and Marco Di Benedetto
    Adaptive Auad Patches: an Adaptive Regular Structure for Web Distribution and Adaptive Rendering of 3D Models
    Winner of the Best Paper Award
    In ACM Web3D 2012. 17th Conference on 3D Web technology. ACM, 2012 [link]
  • Enrico Gobbetti, Fabio Marton, Marco Di Benedetto, Fabio Ganovelli, Matthias Buehler, Simon Schubiger, Matthias Specht, Chris Engels, and Luc Van Gool
    Reconstructing and Exploring Massive Detailed Cityscapes
    In The 12th International Symposium on Virtual Reality, Archaeology and Cultural Heritage, pages 1–9, October 2011
  • Daniele Bernabei, Fabio Ganovelli, Marco Di Benedetto, Matteo Dellepiane, and Roberto Scopigno
    A Low-Cost Time-Critical Obstacle Avoidance System for the Visually Impaired
    In 2011 International Conference on Indoor Positioning and Indoor Navigation (IPIN), 21-23 September 2011, Guimaraes, Portugal, 2011 [link]
  • Marco Di Benedetto, Massimiliano Corsini, and Roberto Scopigno
    SpiderGL: a Graphics Library for 3D Web Applications
    In Proceedings of 3D-ARCH 2011, 2011 [link]
  • Marco Di Benedetto, Federico Ponchio, Fabio Ganovelli, and Roberto Scopigno
    SpiderGL: a JavaScript 3D Graphics Library for Next-Generation WWW
    In Proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Web 3D Technology, Web3D ’10, pages 165–174, New York, NY, USA, 2010. ACM [link]
  • Marco Callieri, Raluca Mihaela Andrei, Marco Di Benedetto, Monica Zoppè, and Roberto Scopigno
    Visualization Methods for Molecular Studies on the Web Platform
    In Proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Web 3D Technology, Web3D ’10, pages 117–126, New York, NY, USA, 2010. ACM [link]
  • Marco Di Benedetto, Paolo Cignoni, Fabio Ganovelli, Enrico Gobbetti, Fabio Marton, and Roberto Scopigno
    Interactive Remote Exploration of Massive Cityscapes
    In The 10th International Symposium on Virtual Reality, Archaeology and Cultural Heritage VAST (2009), pages 9–16. Eurographics, 2009 [link]

Chapters in Books

  • Marco Di Benedetto, Fabio Ganovelli, and Francesco Banterle
    OpenGL Insights - Chapter: Features and Design Choices in SpiderGL
    A K Peters, Ltd. / CRC Press, 2012 [link]
  • Marco Di Benedetto, Jason Brownlee
    Mobile Game Engines - Interviews with Mobile Game Engine Developers
    MobileGameEngines.com, 2013 [link]

Books

  • Fabio Ganovelli, Massimiliano Corsini, Sumanta Pattanaik, and Marco Di Benedetto
    Introduction to Computer Graphics: a Practical Learning Approach
    Chapman & Hall / CRC Press, Expected 2013. Writing in progress


International Projects

Here is a list of my participations in International Projects:

  • V-MUST, Virtual Museum Transnational Network, EU FP7.
  • 3DCOFORM, Tools and Expertise for 3D Collection Formation, EU FP7 IST IP - 231809, 2008-2012.
  • INDIGO, Innovative Training and Decision Support for Emergency Operations, EU FP7 Security - 242341, 2010-2013.
  • V-City, The Virtual City, EU 7FP STREP - ICT-2007.4.3.
  • Crimson, The Crisis Simulation System, EU 6FP SEC4-PR-011500.



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