PROJECTS

Here is a list of selected projects that I have worked on (mostly projects that I worked during spare time). You can find more about my work experience and projects on my LinkedIn page: https://www.linkedin.com/in/uiuctongliu/

• Development of models and decision support tools for sustainable management of integrated crop-livestock systems

This is the primary project that I worked on during my PhD study. This project seeks to develop scientific models and decision support tools for agricultural producers who are interesting in integrating livestock and grain businesses in the Midwest of U.S.. My work was focused on developing a set of analytical approaches and modeling tools to identify the best management strategies that can improve the overall agroecosystem performance, based on data collected from field experiments that include livestock movements (tracked by GPS collars), crop yield and soil property.

Figure 1. The interface of an agent-based model for simulating grazing cattle behaviors and movements

This demo video shows an agent-based model that I developed in NetLogo for simulating the movements of grazing cattle under strip grazing management. Each cow is treated as an agent whose behaviors are modeled as a complex outcome of internal motivations and interactions with other agents and the environment.

• Some projects I did during my spare time

All programs below were written in C++ and OpenGL.

Rendering a Chinese teapot from obj file. A Chinese drawing of horses was mapped to the surface of the teapot. The reflection of environment on the teapot surface was modeled too.

Features: Multi-texturing, environmental mapping, Blinn lighting model, and interactive UI.

An simple animation of a dancing letter "I".

A flight simulator. The plane is moving forward at constant speed. Users can use keyboard to control the plane. For example, pressing the left (right) arrow key will make the plane roll to its left (right). Pressing the up (down) arrow key will cause the airplane to pitch up (down).

A 3D version of dancing letter "I". I modeled it as a particle system and simulate the motion of "I" under the gravity and spring forces among neighbor vertices. The camera position is following a cubic Bezier Curve with a lookat point that is the center of the letter "I".