Research seminars

Bio: Adrián Jarabo is a research scientist at Meta Reality Labs Research, where he leads a small team focusing on real-time and inverse rendering of virtual humans. Before joining Meta in 2022, he was an Assistant Professor at Universidad de Zaragoza. He has published over 50 papers in topics including physics-based rendering, appearance modeling and computational imaging. He is a Eurographics Junior Fellow, and the recipient of the Eurographics Young Researcher Award and the Eurographics PhD Award in 2021 and 2017, respectively. 

Abstract: In this talk we will describe our recent efforts on developing general, ray-traced volumetric representations for modeling complex volumetric materials in forward and inverse rendering applications, with applications to physics-based rendering and scene reconstruction. Volumetric heterogeneous materials are widespread in real-life in general, and humans in particular, with notable examples such as skin, cloth or hair. However, finding a good representation for such materials is still an open problem. During the talk, we will walk through the development of our ray-traced mixture-based approach for volumetric representations that provides a number of benefits with respect to the widely used voxel grids, discuss our choices, and show how our project grew from a small physics-based hair rendering project to a wider general framework for rendering and scene reconstruction.   

Bio: Antonio Gonzalez received his Ph.D. degree from the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC), in Barcelona, Spain, in 1989. He was the founding director of the Intel Barcelona Research Center from 2002 to 2014. His research has focused on computer architecture, compilers and parallel processing, with a special emphasis on processor microarchitecture and code generation. He has published over 400 papers, has given over 130 invited talks, holds 53 patents, has advised 40 PhD theses in these areas. Antonio is the recipient of an ERC Advanced Grant. He has a long track record of innovations through technology transfers of his research results to commercial products, especially microprocessors and computing systems in general.

Abstract: Mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets have become the most commonly used computing device nowadays, and projections forecast a significant growth in the future in both the number of shipped units and their capabilities. These devices have become quite powerful and most applications that run on them make an intensive use of graphics animation to provide a rich user experience. Energy consumption and the related heat dissipation issues are the main constraints for the capabilities provided by such systems. These systems are equipped with a very small battery that is expected to last for hours if not days, and since they are normally handheld, their external temperature cannot significantly exceed typical human levels. To provide richer user experiences in these devices, dramatic improvements in energy efficiency are required. This talk focuses on one of the main components of these systems, which is the GPU, and describes some novel microarchitectures that we have recently developed for increasing its performance and energy efficiency.