Claudio T. Silva

Computer Science and Engineering
Polytechnic Institute of NYU (NYU-Poly)
Six Metrotech Center
Brooklyn, NY 11201

Office phone: 718-260-4093
Office fax: 718-260-3609
[first letter of my first name][last name] [at] poly.edu (best way to reach me)

I moved to NYU-Poly on July 1st, 2011, and these pages are unfortunately incomplete.

Research Interests

Visualization and Data Analysis, Geometry Processing, Scientific Data Management, Computational Science, High-Performance Computing, Computer Graphics, Applications of Computational Techniques to Medicine, Biology and Engineering.

Bio

Claudio Silva is a Professor of computer science and engineering at the Polytechnic Institute of NYU. Between 2003 and 2011, he worked at University of Utah. Before joining Utah in 2003, he has held positions at industrial and government labs (IBM, AT&T, Sandia, LLNL) where he has led a number of large research and development efforts. He has coauthored 170 publications, served on 80 international program committees and five editorial boards, and chaired or organized a number of major conferences, including the IEEE Visualization conference. His research focus on visualization, provenance analytics, scientific data management, geometry processing, and related areas. The techniques and software that his group has developed are used throughout the world in both academic and industrial settings. His work received academic and industrial awards. In particular, he received IBM Faculty Awards in 2005, 2006, and 2007, and best paper awards at IEEE Visualization 2007, IEEE Shape Modeling International 2008, the 2010 Eurographics Educator Program, EuroVis 2011, and EGPGV 2011. In 2009, the VisTrails Provenance Plugin for Autodesk Maya received an Utah Innovation Award. His work is funded by grants from the NSF, NIH, DOE, IBM, and ExxonMobil.

Select Honors

Best panel award, IEEE VisWeek 2011
Best paper award (2nd prize), EuroVis 2011
Best paper award, ACM Eurographics Symposium on Parallel Graphics and Visualization 2011
Finalist, Executable Paper Grand Challenge, 2011
Best paper award, EUROGRAPHICS 2010 Educator Program
Best poster award, 24th Brazilian Symposium On Databases (SBBD 2009)
2009 Utah Innovation Awards, VisTrails Provenance Plugin for Autodesk Maya
Best paper award, IEEE Shape Modeling International 2008
Best paper award, IEEE Visualization 2007
Best paper finalist, IEEE Shape Modeling International 2007
Dean's Teaching Commendation, Spring 2007
IBM Faculty Award, 2005, 2006, and 2007
National Science Foundation Post-Doctoral CISE Associateship Award, 1996--1997
1st place, Entrance exam, Mathematics, Federal University of Ceara, Brazil

Courses

NYU-Poly:
Data Visualization -- Spring 2012

University of Utah:
See here

Projects

VisTrails
BirdVis
Point-Based Modeling and Rendering
Scalable Displays
Large-Scale 3D Scanning
Visibility Algorithms Unstructured Volumetric Grids
Out-Of-Core Algorithms for Scientific Visualization
Surface and Volume Simplification
Parallel Rendering

Students and Postdocs

(Most supervised theses are available online)

NYU-Poly:
Wendel Silva (Ph.D. in progress)
Nivan Ferreira (Ph.D. in progress)
Jorge Poco (Ph.D. in progress)
Jonathas Costa (Ph.D. in progress)
Daniel K. Osmari (Ph.D. in progress)

University of Utah:
Matt Berger (ABD)
Tiago Etiene (ABD)
Erik Anderson (Ph.D., 2011)
David Koop (Ph.D., 2011; Co-advised with Juliana Freire)
Huy T. Vo (Ph.D., 2011)
Linh K. Ha (Ph.D., 2011; Co-advised with Sarang Joshi and Jens Krueger)
Claurissa Tuttle (M.S., 2011)
Emanuele Santos (Ph.D., 2010; Co-advised with Juliana Freire)
Hao Wang (M.S.--project option, 2010).
Carlos Scheidegger (Ph.D., 2009)
Joel D. Daniels II (Ph.D., 2009; Co-advised with Elaine Cohen)
Tilo Ochotta (Post-doc, 2008--2009)
John Schreiner (Ph.D., 2008)
Steven P. Callahan (Ph.D., 2008)
Heballa Benan Alzahawi (M.S.--project option, 2008)
Yuan Zhou (Post-doc, 2007--2008)
Louis Bavoil (M.S--thesis option, 2006)
Steven P. Callahan (M.S.--thesis option, 2005)
Shachar Fleishman (Post-doc, 2004--2005)
Sinesio Pesco (Post-doc, 2003--2004)
Dirce Uesu (Post-doc, 2003--2004)

Princeton:
Wagner Correa (Ph.D., 2003; Co-advised with Szymon Rusinkiewicz)

SUNY-Stony Brook:
Ricardo Farias (Ph.D., 2001; Co-advised with Joseph Mitchell)
Tsung-Chin Ho (Ph.D., 2001; Co-advised with Joseph Mitchell)

Publications

Supervised Theses
Online papers

Google Scholar profile
DBLP

Software

(For missing links, see here)

http://www.vistrails.org

http://afront.sourceforge.net, by Schreiner, Scheidegger, Fleishman and others.

http://havs.sourceforge.net, implementation of the Hardware-Assisted Visibility Sorting (HAVS) algorithm for rendering unstructured grids, by Callahan, Ikits, and others. Note that there is also a version of the HAVS algorithm implemented in VTK: vtkHAVSVolumeMapper.html.

GPU-based ray caster for Unstructured Meshes, by Bernardon and Comba.

TetMesh Comparator (tmc), for measuring errors between two tet meshes, by Louis Bavoil.

GTB: Graphics Toolbox, includes implementation of Correa's PhD thesis (in particular, iWalk)

GcTin, Greedy-Cuts terrain triangulation.

ZSWEEP, implementation by R. Farias of the ZSWEEP algorithm. Note that Kitware has implemented ZSWEEP in the most recent version of VTK. Here is a link to the class hierarchy: vtkUnstructuredGridVolumeZSweepMapper. I have not tested their implementation against the original one, but this one is certainly easier to use, since it is fully integrated into both VTK and Paraview. I have been told this is the preferred way to generate high-quality images of unstructured grids in VTK.

Raytrace, Unstructured-grid ray tracer, by Bunyk. This has also been implemented into VTK, see vtkUnstructuredGridBunykRayCastFunction

oocsx.m, partial Mathematica implementation of the OoCSx algorithm.