@topher_batty@mastodon.acm.org avatar

topher_batty

@topher_batty@mastodon.acm.org

Associate Professor in CS at University of Waterloo doing computer graphics and computational physics. I also manage https://physicsbasedanimation.com and maintain a list of graphics researchers on Mastodon: https://christopherbatty.github.io/Mastodon-Graphics-Academics/

This profile is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.

topher_batty, to random
@topher_batty@mastodon.acm.org avatar

I like when academics say "I'm looking for a postdoc" because you don't know if they want to be one, want to hire one, or just misplaced one somewhere.

HeavenlyPossum, to random
@HeavenlyPossum@kolektiva.social avatar

If Biden loses—or, more likely, if Trump coups his way into power—I fully expect that a lot of liberals will devote more of their energy into yelling at people online for not voting hard enough than in resisting the fascism they keep warning us is imminent.

topher_batty,
@topher_batty@mastodon.acm.org avatar

@HeavenlyPossum leftist preemptively ineffectually scolding liberals for hypothetically ineffectually scolding leftists? A few more rounds of this back and forth and we'll surely have the whole thing solved! 😀

topher_batty, to random
@topher_batty@mastodon.acm.org avatar

I'm very excited to share our new SIGGRAPH Asia 2023 paper on improved reconstruction of explicit surface meshes from signed distance field data: "Reach for the Spheres: Tangency-Aware Surface Reconstruction of SDFs".

https://odedstein.com/projects/reach-for-the-spheres/

topher_batty, to random
@topher_batty@mastodon.acm.org avatar

For computer graphics academics and researchers, I threw this list of folks together. Apologies if I've forgotten anyone or included anyone who prefers to be forgotten! Let me know if there are any errors or corrections. Hoping this will help folks migrating from the birdsite. 🙂
https://christopherbatty.github.io/Mastodon-Graphics-Academics/

topher_batty, to random
@topher_batty@mastodon.acm.org avatar

The first of the two SIGGRAPH North America 2024 papers I'm on is "Reach for the Arcs: Reconstructing Surfaces
from SDFs via Tangent Points" https://odedstein.com/projects/reach-for-the-arcs/

Building on our SIG Asia "Reach for the Spheres" idea, we interpret discrete signed distance field data as a collection of spheres, to which the unknown surface must lie tangent at (at least) one point. We further observe that only the "arcs" of spheres not covered by other spheres can host valid closest/tangent points.

topher_batty, to random
@topher_batty@mastodon.acm.org avatar

The code for our "Reach for the Spheres" SDF reconstruction paper is now online: https://github.com/sgsellan/reach-for-the-spheres/

flexghost, to random
@flexghost@mastodon.social avatar

In 2020 we has to defeat the far-right

In 2024 we also need to defeat the far-left.

Vote.

🇺🇸

topher_batty,
@topher_batty@mastodon.acm.org avatar

@flexghost I dunno, you could try winning their votes.

topher_batty, to random
@topher_batty@mastodon.acm.org avatar

For those attending , be sure to get up early for the "Pushing the Boundaries" paper session on Wed at 9am. Ryusuke Sugimoto will present our work on a Monte Carlo raytracing-like algorithm for solving Laplace/Poisson problems called the Walk on Boundary method. https://rsugimoto.net/WoBforBVPsProject/ Then, you can start converting all your favorite rendering techniques into PDE solvers!

topher_batty, to random
@topher_batty@mastodon.acm.org avatar

Actually pretty excited to attend my first ever SIGGRAPH Asia next week! Only took me 15 years to get around to it.

I'll be chairing the Fluid Simulation session on Tuesday and @silviasellan is presenting our paper on SDF reconstruction at the Reconstruction session on Thursday. See ya there.

topher_batty, to random
@topher_batty@mastodon.acm.org avatar

I occasionally think fondly of this old Square One song about Tesselations.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sFwSpw7Bv3s

topher_batty, to random
@topher_batty@mastodon.acm.org avatar

Our paper on solving Poisson problems using Monte Carlo raytracing-like techniques now has a video up on youtube, thanks to first author Ryusuke Sugimoto: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5SDhXJ3Sjmo

topher_batty, to random
@topher_batty@mastodon.acm.org avatar

So far this year a quick Google turns up only two SIGGRAPH 2024 authors that have prematurely broken anonymity on their websites before receiving final acceptance of their paper. That's not half bad given the number of papers accepted.

topher_batty, to random
@topher_batty@mastodon.acm.org avatar

Check out my latest collaboration with Tetsuya Takahashi on efficiently solving box-constrained QPs, especially for fluid animation problems on Cartesian grids, using an interior point method and a tailored algebraic multigrid preconditioner: https://tetsuya-takahashi.github.io/PD_BCQP/
And here's the YouTube link:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GeeweiNzcOQ

HeavenlyPossum, to random
@HeavenlyPossum@kolektiva.social avatar

“How would we do this or that under anarchism?”

Consensually, through voluntary agreement, or by yourself, without coercive interference.

I’m sure that sounds like a cop-out to a lot of people, but it’s based on a principle of humility: we can’t possibly know what solutions people will pursue, negotiate, and adapt to the ever-evolving problems we face in the world.

Some anarchists have invested a lot of work in figuring out how we might organize ourselves if free—federations of councils and the like—and that work is valuable. Some people might adopt some of those solutions some of the time. But it’s not for me or anyone else to prejudge or insist upon any particular solution.

We’ll do it together, in free cooperation, by talking to each other, persuading each other, inducing each other, or by leaving each other alone.

1/

topher_batty,
@topher_batty@mastodon.acm.org avatar

@HeavenlyPossum I have no background in any of this, so excuse my dumb questions: isn't there a prisoner's dilemma-like element here? Aren't you at the mercy of any single person (or group) who decides they hate all your bothersome negotiating and simply takes up arms to force their will? If they decide they're the state now, aren't you (and your society) powerless, since you cannot coerce/force them to stop? It all seems to collapse upon contact with any disagreeable person(s).

aeva, to random
@aeva@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar

random brain wandering:

Suppose you have a cellular space like a grid or a quad tree or such. Each cell intersecting a shape (say, a triangle) records relative surface feature (say, a plane) that might be useful for recovering or extrapolating a nearest point on surface. Maybe a cell stores an authoritative surface feature, or maybe it can have several, doesn't really matter for this post.

Then, empty neighbors use that data to generate their own (non-overlapping) relative surface features.

topher_batty,
@topher_batty@mastodon.acm.org avatar

@demofox @aeva also more or less describes the mesh to SDF construction algorithm in my Github (shamelessly stolen from my PhD supervisor, I just added the cmdline interface)

nervous_jesse, to random
@nervous_jesse@mathstodon.xyz avatar

There's a lot of obfuscation in scientific papers, especially when it comes to mathematification. A good one is when there is an algorithm with a magic number in it, so they just call it a "variable," and then they're like in all our examples we set this variable to SOME_VALUE. This is because arbitrary numbers are considered bad practice, but if it's a variable we've tuned then it was a scientific process.

topher_batty,
@topher_batty@mastodon.acm.org avatar

@nervous_jesse I mean, probably better to acknowledge it's an empirically chosen parameter value that seems to work, than to claim it's the one true perfect magic number that shall not be questioned. But yeah, it's still magic numbers at the end of the day.

topher_batty, to random
@topher_batty@mastodon.acm.org avatar

Fun typo in this quote from a Hollywood Reporter story about Netflix's 3 Body Problem: “Liu Cixin’s created this inedible trilogy and the books just get better for me." Completely changes the metaphor, and meaning. https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/tv/tv-features/3-body-problem-season-2-netflix-1235857474/

demofox, to random
@demofox@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar

Somedays it's a lot easier than others to understand why Lao Tse wandered off into the wilderness 😂

topher_batty,
@topher_batty@mastodon.acm.org avatar

@aeva @demofox I don't know, if 'agile scrum' can weasel its way even into polycules, the wilderness itself can't be far behind... https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/04/15/magazine/polycule-polyamory-boston.html

j_bertolotti, to random
@j_bertolotti@mathstodon.xyz avatar

People studying brains: "We found no correlation between number of neurons and IQ."*

People talking about AI: "If we just add more nodes to our deep neural network we are surely going to create a super-mind!"

topher_batty,
@topher_batty@mastodon.acm.org avatar

@j_bertolotti for this to be evidence of something, doesn't it assume that NNs are equivalent to physical neurons? Is that really true?

aeva, (edited ) to random
@aeva@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar

graphics research lifehack: you can cut out a ton of paywall scams and inscrutable academic wankery by excluding "we present" from your searches

topher_batty,
@topher_batty@mastodon.acm.org avatar

@aeva publishing failures is an idea not without merits, but realistically if the only thing you change is (somehow) removing the incentive to publish mostly things that work well / better, many of the other issues you mentioned would be worsened. The space of "stuff that was a wrong/foolish/flawed idea" is quite large, making it even easier to flood the literature with half-assed, poorly written, unnecessary papers to dig through. Careful what you wish for.

topher_batty,
@topher_batty@mastodon.acm.org avatar

@aeva seems like an unnecessarily mean-spirited dunk on academics, yeesh, but regardless, I don't quite get it -- how does appending "we present" achieve your (I presume) goal of avoiding academic writing? there's no shortage of verbose and inscrutable papers that start off that way.

topher_batty,
@topher_batty@mastodon.acm.org avatar

@julian @aeva tangentially, this reminds me that last week on a whim I pushed a chunk of one of my papers through an LLM asking it to rephrase it in the style of a gamedev blogger (and then also in the style of James Joyce, and of a historic European explorer). Amusing results, but also not a particularly effective solution!

demofox, to random
@demofox@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar

LF individual with last name of Mann to co author a paper and help invent the Wolfe Mann algorithm :)

topher_batty,
@topher_batty@mastodon.acm.org avatar

@demofox no, not that one, this one: https://cs.uwaterloo.ca/~smann/

topher_batty,
@topher_batty@mastodon.acm.org avatar

@demofox you could try my colleague Steve Mann.

demofox, to random
@demofox@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar

Does anyone know of any code laying around the net that distributes points on a mesh in a blue noise distribution?
A student intern i work with is looking for this. It's tempting to write it, but im also kinda swamped :X

topher_batty,
@topher_batty@mastodon.acm.org avatar

@demofox https://www.alecjacobson.com/weblog/4111.html maybe?

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