Abe Stephens


abe (at) sci

Contact me via: Linkedin
Cell: 518 265 9722
aim/ichat: abestephens



News

My PhD was conferred on May 6, 2011.

Dissertation: CONTROL OF SPATIAL AND TEMPORAL FIDELITY WITH ADAPTIVE SAMPLING (pdf)

I released my FindCuda.cmake script which makes setting up a Nvidia CUDA application very easy.

Info

I am a PhD graduate student at the University of Utah. I work on temporally adaptive rendering methods. I am also a principle contributor to the Manta Interactive Ray Tracer. I work with Steven Parker at the Scientific Computing and Imaging Institute (home page). I grew up in upstate NY and received my BS in Computer Science from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in 2003. At RPI I worked with Carlos Varela on actor based distributed computing techniques (home page).
I've spent my summers working on ray tracers with both Silicon Graphics and Intel Corporation.

  3D data provided by Boeing Corporation
Left to right: Two GPU ray traced images from "Statistically Quantitative Volume Visualization". Two traditionally rendered GPU particle images. Image from a parallel batch renderer. Transparent rendering from the Boeing 777.

Manta Ray Tracer

Manta is a highly portable interactive ray tracing environment designed to be used on both workstations and super computers. The project was started at the Scientific Computing and Imaging Institute at the University of Utah and is now used by a larger community including academic research groups and companies.

Additional information is available on the Manta wiki

Super Computing 2005 Demo (white paper pdf -- section 4.6)

Short Movie. (mov 8M)
(This was used during one slide of a presentation. The quality and frame rate are much lower than when the stream was recorded.)






Publications


A. Dietrich, A. Stephens, I. Wald. Exploring a Boeing 777: Ray Tracing Large-Scale CAD Data IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications, v. 27-6. 2007, pp. 36-46
L. Butler, A. Stephens Bullet Ray Vision Proceedings of the IEEE Symposium on Interactive Ray Tracing, 2007, (to appear) (mov)
J. Bigler, A. Stephens and S. G. Parker Design for Parallel Interactive Ray Tracing Systems Proceedings of the IEEE Symposium on Interactive Ray Tracing, 2006, pp. 187-196 (pdf)


C. Gribble, A. Stephens, J. Guilkey, and S. G. Parker  Visualizing Particle-Based Simulation Datasets on the Desktop. British HCI 2006 Workshop on Combining Visualization and Interaction to Facilitate Scientific Exploration and Discovery (September 2006) (to appear) (pdf)

A. Stephens, S. Boulos, J. Bigler, I. Wald, and S. G. Parker An Application of Scalable Massive Model Interaction using Shared Memory Systems Proceedings of the Eurographics Symposium on Parallel Graphics and Visualization, 2006, (to appear) (pdf)

J.M. Kniss, R. Van Uitert, A. Stephens, G. Li, T. Tasdizen. Statistically Quantitative Volume Visualization, In IEEE Visualization 2005, 2005.

T. Desell, H. Iyer, A. Stephens, C. Varela. OverView: A Framework for Generic Online Visualization of Distributed Systems , European Joint Conferences on Theory and Practice of Software (ETAPS 2004), eclipse Technology eXchange (eTX) workshop. Barcelona, Spain. March 30, 2004.  (pdf)

Courses & Tutorials


  D. Kasik, A. Dietrich, E. Gobbetti, F. Marton, D. Manocha, P. Slusallek, A. Stephens, S. Yoon, 2008. Massive Model Visualization Techniques. In ACM SIGGRAPH 2008 Classes (Los Angeles, California, August 11 - 15, 2008). SIGGRAPH '08. ACM, New York, NY, 1-188.

  D. Kasik, B. Bruderlin, W. Correa, A. Dietrich, E. Gobbetti, D. Manocha, F. Marton, I. Quilez, A. Stephens, S. Yoon Course 4: State of the Art in Massive Model Visualization. SIGGRAPH 2007. San Diego (web site)

  D. Kasik, D. Manocha, A. Stephens. B. Bruderlin, P. Slusallek, E. Gobbetti, W. Correa, I. Quilez Tutorial 2: Real-time Interactive Massive Model Visualization. Eurographics 2006. Vienna. (pdf) (web site)

  P. Shirley, P. Slusallek, I. Wald, W. Mark, G. Stoll, D. Manocha, A. Stephens  Course 4: State of the Art in Interactive Ray Tracing. SIGGRAPH 2006. Boston. (web site) (pdf)

Posters


  E. Cheslack-Postava, A. Dayal, A. Stephens, D. Luebke, B. Watson. Improved Adaptive Frameless Rendering Using Edge Respecting Filters Presented at IEEE Symposium on Interactive Ray Tracing, 2006, (to appear)



Course Work

Spring 2005     cs6620 Ray Tracing, Instructor: Steven Parker (projectsmost interesting
Spring 2004     cs6620 Meshes, Instructor: Emil Praun. (final project)
Fall 2003         cs6961 Computational Geometry, Instructor: Emil Praun. (final project)

Seminar Slides

SCI Seminar April 7 2005 "EGPGV Talk" (See paper above.)

Graphics Seminar Spring 2005 "Programmable Graphics Hardware, Performance & Paradigms" (pdf)

Graphics Seminar Fall 2004 "Interactive Visualization of Particle Datasets" (pdf)



Before finding my way to rendering and particle visualization and my advisor Steve Parker, I worked with Mike Kirby and Chuck Hansen. I constructed a GPU volume renderer (web page) which positioned slices uniformly in uniform device coordinates (after projection).

I enjoy mountain biking (old mov), skiing, and cooking. I also enjoy hosting film nights.

2007 Skiing:
alta-022407

2006 Skiing:
alta-031006

2005 Skiing:
snowbird-010405  snowbird-020805  snowbird-021505