Tuesday, March 13, 2001
Visualization grew from computer graphics and its application to scientific and biomedical problems. Early work in graphics concentrated on rendering algorithms and their implementation in hardware. But applications in aerospace and medicine motivated researchers to look beyond rendering and to develop techniques that give scientists and doctors insight into their data. The practical delivery of visualization technology required sophisticated software architectures and, fortunately, object-oriented techniques became available during the same period.
This talk describes the development of visualization algorithms and software over the past twenty years. The application focus is on scientific, industrial and medical visualization at GE's Corporate Research and Development Center. Robot simulation, imaged-guided surgery, aircraft engine design and golf green visualization illustrate the power and breadth of the technology developed. The drivers for yesterday's applications and those in the future will be presented. Also the impact of the Open Source movement and Extreme Programming on visualization systems will be discussed.
Bill Lorensen is a Graphics Engineer in the Electronic Systems Laboratory at GE's Corporate Research and Development Center in Schenectady, New York. He has over 30 years of experience in computer graphics and software engineering. Bill is currency working on algorithms for 3D medical graphics and scientific visualization. He co-developed (with Harvey Cline) the marching cubes and dividing cubes surface extraction algorithms, two popular isosurface extraction algorithms. His other interests included computer animation, information display, and object-oriented software tools. Bill is the author or co-author of over 60 technical articles on topics ranging from finite element pre/postprocessing, 3D medical imaging, computer animation and object-oriented design. He is co-author of Object-Oriented Modeling and Design, published by Prentice Hall, 1991. He is also co-author with Will Schroeder and Ken Martin of the book, The Visualization Toolkit: An Object-Oriented Approach to ED Graphics, published by Prentice Hall in November 1997. The text describes vtk, an open source visualization C++ class ilbrary. He gives frequent tutorials at the annual SIG GRAPH and IEEE Visualization conferences. Bill holds 26 US Patents on medical and visualization algorithms. In 1991, he was named a Coolidge Fellow, the highest scientific honor at GE's Corporate R&D.
Prior to joining GE in 1978, he was a Mathematician at the US Army Benet Weapons Laboratory where he worked on computer graphics software for structural analysis. He has a BS in Mathematics and an MS in Computer Science from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.
For directions to CESTM go to https://www.albany.edu/about_the_university/maps/uptown.html.
For additional information call (518) 442-3332.
Bill Lorensen
Graphics Engineer
GE Corporate Research & Development
Center for Environmental Sciences & Technology Management (CESTM) Auditorium
University at Albany
4 p.m. to 6 p.m.
Sponsored by the University at Albany�s Division for Research
20 Years of Object-Oriented Visualization
