Beach Ball: 4th of July Icon and CSE 168 Honorable Mention

Computer science grad student Oleg Bisker's final image from the Spring 2010 version of CSE 168 looks like a good kick off to the 4th of July weekend. Bisker created the image using C++ programming code...not a digital camera and Photoshop or Picasa. (Class Web site here.)

Oleg, can you give us any insights on this image? What was trickiest part? What aspects of the image are you most happy about? Any other thoughts?

Update: Oleg pointed me to the CSE 168 Spring 2010 competition Web site where he and the other participants had to provide info on the process that led them to their images.

Oleg wrote:

My inspiration for this project was the much loved San Diego beach. I wanted to do an outdoor scene with some water, sand and a geometrically simple but visually sophisticated beach ball.

Read the rest of the Bisker beach ball story here.

Candle Lights win Graphics Competition

If a picture is worth a 1,000 words, then the computer science corollary must be “a picture is worth a 1,000 lines of C++ code.”

That’s certainly the case for the computer science students at the University of California, San Diego who paint pictures with C++ computer programming code. Computer science professor Henrik Wann Jensen – winner of a 2004 Academy Award for his work on realistic, computer-generated human skin – taught the class: CSE 168: Rendering Algorithms.

For their final project, the Rendering Algorithms students pulled together what they’d learned about generating digital images from their own computer code and painted one final picture with C++.

The image above won the grand prize this year. Computer science master’s students Carlos Dominguez-Caballero and Holmes Futrell created the image. Congrats.

See first and second place and honorable mention images here.

See images from the final presentations here.

Read about how A Picture is Worth a 1,000 lines of C++ Code.

Union Tribune Headline: Stimulus funding flowing at UCSD

Today's San Diego Union Tribune includes a story by Gary Robbins about research funding at UC San Diego.

Federal stimulus money helped UCSD receive a record $1 billion in the past year for research, triggering a boom that’s expected to create more jobs and deepen scientists’ understanding of everything from sickle cell anemia to ocean currents.

The bit about understanding ocean currents refers, at least in part, to a project led by professor Jorge Cortes from the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering (MAE). Cortes and colleagues won NSF funding to figure out how to implement the controls systems that keep swarms of underwater ocean robots in the kinds of formations that will enable them to collect the data necessary to figure out what is going on with ocean currents in the area. (read full story here

This project is related to one led by the Scripps Institution of Oceanography here at UC San Diego.

In the news:
Robot Swarms on DC Airwaves
Robots on KPBS radio