Events for December 11, 2007
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CS Colloquia: Interactive and Intuitive Appearance Design
Tue, Dec 11, 2007 @ 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM
Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Title: Interactive and Intuitive Appearance Design Speaker : Professor Fabio Pellacini - Dartmouth CollegeABSTRACT:
The appearance of objects comes from the interaction of scene lighting and
surface materials, whose careful definition is necessary to achieve the
remarkable sophistication of today's synthetic imagery.
Currently, appearance design is one of the remaining roadblocks for a
ubiquitous use of computer-generated imagery, since slow user feedback and
cumbersome user interfaces make the process significantly time consuming for
expert designers, and beyond the reach of novices.In this talk, I will present our recent results in rendering accurate
lighting for complex environments where we achieve interactivity by
developing new approximation algorithms that can take advantage of inherent
properties of lighting and of today's commodity hardware architectures.
These algorithms completely change the workflow of artists from an offline
to a fully interactive process.
I will also show results from algorithms that build on this interactivity to
support intuitive user interfaces for appearance design that drastically
simplify the time require for designing appearance.BIO:
Fabio Pellacini is an assistant professor in computer science at Dartmouth
College. His research focuses on algorithms for interactive, high-quality
rendering of complex environments and for artist-friendly material and
lighting design to support more effective content creation.Prior to joining academia, Pellacini worked at Pixar Animation Studios on
lighting algorithms, where he received credits on various movie productions.Pellacini received his Laurea degree in physics from the University of Parma
(Italy), and his M.S. and Ph.D. in computer science from Cornell University.Location: Seaver Science Library (SSL) - 150
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: CS Colloquia
This event is open to all eligible individuals. USC Viterbi operates all of its activities consistent with the University's Notice of Non-Discrimination. Eligibility is not determined based on race, sex, ethnicity, sexual orientation, or any other prohibited factor.
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CS Colloquia: Mechanism Design, Machine Learning, and Pricing Problems
Tue, Dec 11, 2007 @ 04:00 PM - 05:30 PM
Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Title: Mechanism Design, Machine Learning, and Pricing ProblemsSpeaker: Maria-Florina Balcan(CMU)ABSTRACT:
In this work, we make an explicit connection between machine learning and
mechanism design. In doing so, we obtain a unified approach for considering a
variety of profit maximizing mechanism design problems, including many that
have been previously considered in the literature. In particular, we use
techniques from sample complexity in machine learning theory to reduce
problems of incentive compatible mechanism design to standard algorithmic
questions. We apply these results to a wide variety of revenue-maximizing
pricing problems, including the problem of auctioning a digital good, the
attribute auction problem, and the problem of item pricing in unlimited supply
combinatorial auctions. From a learning perspective, these settings present
several unique challenges: the loss function is discontinuous and asymmetric,
and the range of bidders' valuations may be large. This talk is based on joint work with Avrim Blum, Jason Hartline, and Yishay
Mansour.BIO:
Maria-Florina Balcan is a Ph.D. candidate at Carnegie Mellon University under
the supervision of Avrim Blum. She received B.S. and M.S. degrees from the
Faculty of Mathematics, University of Bucharest, Romania. Her main research
interests are Computational and Statistical Machine Learning, Computational
Aspects in Economics and Game Theory, and Algorithms. She is a recipient of
the IBM PhD Fellowship.Location: Seaver Science Library (SSL) - 150
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: CS Colloquia
This event is open to all eligible individuals. USC Viterbi operates all of its activities consistent with the University's Notice of Non-Discrimination. Eligibility is not determined based on race, sex, ethnicity, sexual orientation, or any other prohibited factor.
