Thomas Fogal

I hold a couple different affiliations these days. I am a

Software developer at the Scientific Computing and Imaging Institute.
Member of the Intel Visual Computing Institute.
Doctoral student at the Universität des Saarland.

I did my graduate (masters) and undergraduate work at the University of New Hampshire. My thesis committee consisted of Prof. Bergeron, Prof. Hatcher, and Dr. Childs. In February 2012, I began my Ph.D. with Jens Krüger at the Universität des Saarland.

My interests lie in parallel and distributed systems, particularly their application to large scale visualization. These days, I do a lot of medical visualization as well, and so I've become interested in topics such as segmentation and image analysis -- in particular how we can solve them for incredibly large data (sensing a theme?).

Publications

If you notice any BibTeX errors, typos, etc. please contact me. Also, please note that these are my personal copies of papers, and may contain minor edits, changes, or reformatting as compared to the versions in published volumes (as one example, in our 2010 HPG paper I had screwed up a label in one of our graphs; it's printed wrong, but the paper here is correct). I will never make substantial changes, but "substantial" is entirely in my subjective opinion; if you want the original paper, get it from the publisher.

*Publications*
Teaser	Authors	Title	Materials			Venue
Teaser	Authors	Title	Paper	BibTeX	Presentation	Venue
2012
	Carson Brownlee, Thomas Fogal, Charles D. Hansen	GLuRay: Ray Tracing in Scientific Visualization Applications using OpenGL Interception				EGPGV'12
	Christopher Butson, Georg Tamm, Sanket Jain, Thomas Fogal, Jens Krüger	Evaluation of Interactive Visualization on Mobile Computing Platforms for Selection of Deep Brain Stimulation Parameters				TVCG
2011
	Thomas Fogal, Jens Krüger	Efficient IO for Parallel Visualization				EGPGV'11
2010
	Thomas Fogal, Jens Krüger	Tuvok, an Architecture for Large Scale Volume Rendering				VMV 2010
	Thomas Fogal, Hank Childs, Siddharth Shankar, Jens Krüger, R. D. Bergeron, P. Hatcher	Large Data Visualization on Distributed Memory Multi-GPU Clusters			PPT	HPG 2010
2009
	E. W. Bethel, C.R. Johnson, S. Ahern, J. Bell, P.-T. Bremer, H. Childs, E. Cormier-Michel, M. Day, E. Deines, T. Fogal, C. Garth, C.G.R. Geddes, H. Hagen, B. Hamann, C.D. Hansen, J. Jacobsen, K.I. Joy, J. Krüger, J. Meredith, P. Messmer, G. Ostrouchov, V. Pascucci, K. Potter, Prabhat, D. Pugmire, O. Rübel, A. Sanderson, C.T. Silva, D. Ushizima, G.H. Weber, B. Whitlock, K. Wu	Occam's Razor and Petascale Visual Data Analysis				Journal of Physics: Conference Series
	Thomas Fogal, Jens Krüger	Size Matters - Revealing Small Scale Structures in Large Datasets	(warning: 50M!)			World Congress on Medical Physics and Biomedical Engineering 2009
	Jens Krüger, Thomas Fogal	Focus and Context: Visualization without the Complexity			Poster	World Congress on Medical Physics and Biomedical Engineering 2009

Notable Work

Longhorn press release in which I was interviewed about our work for our 2010 HPG paper. Looks like the same story also got picked up by HPCWire and Dr. Dobbs.
iOS (iPhone, iPad) volume rendering software. I occasionally get interviewed so that I can take credit for my colleagues' work. In all seriousness, I do mention that Jens did the work here, but what the "scientist" says and what gets implied do not always align. There was also a second round covering basically the same thing (KSL), and an ACM TechNews story about it. I like the KSL link best, because you get to see me :)
Best Science Visualization Videos of 2009. I worked on this video.

Employment

I have a dual appointment in both the U.S. and Germany. I spend 9 months of every year in Saarbrücken, working on my doctorate with Jens Krüger. I spend the summers back in Utah, working as a software developer at the SCI Institute. Don't tell them, but I sneak in some research while I'm there, too.

I spent the summer of 2008 at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, working under the excellent guidance of Sean Ahern. If Sean ever ends up reading this: Sean, you need something better I can link to.

I spent summer 2007 in Livermore, California, working at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory on VisIt. Somehow I convinced them to provide a cluster, some parallel rendering libraries, and money, whilst all I had to do is play around with the software all day. I was extremely fortunate to work with the guidance of Hank Childs while I was out there.

At UNH, I was of course part of the computer science department. I also used to work for Dr. Raeder out of the physics department. To simplify greatly, I worked on various methods for visualizing large datasets. You can find out a lot about the types of things I worked on (or with) by Googling my name.

Sorry, I don't keep my resume online anymore. It was perpetually out of date, and rampaging killbots in the Octilian sector would scrape my email from it. I'm very happy with my current employment right now anyway, so you probably wouldn't have any luck recruiting me.

Contact

My username is `tfogal'. You should be able to figure out the domain associated with it by looking at the website you're visiting (hint: drop the "www."). I also use an alumni.unh.edu address somewhat frequently. I seem to confuse many people with this. It's not a real address; it just forwards to my SCI email at present, and 10: someday when I must leave here it'll forward to wherever I go next. GOTO 10.

I own is-useless.org (which has wonderful subdomain potential), but the webserver is down indefinitely as I don't have as much time for system administration as I used to. I used to run a SILC server for geeks / nerds on it as well, but again I'm a lazy sysadmin and ... long story short, we just hang out on freenode now. Ask me about it in person or over email, but note I am a champion idler.