Gopalan Nadathur
Programming Languages Design and Implementation, Computational Logic
(612) 626-1354
gopalan@cs.umn.edu
http://www.cs.umn.edu/~gopalan
A fact about our computing discipline is that the kinds of problems we want to solve and the physical devices available to us for realizing their solutions are constantly changing. Research in programming languages is oriented towards developing tools for dealing with this situation. A major concern in language design is abstracting away from actual hardware and focusing instead on new and general methods for expressing solutions to computational problems and on techniques for organizing the presentation of such solutions. The complementary aspect of implementation targets the eventual mapping of apparently abstract language constructs onto available hardware. My particular interest is in programming languages that can serve simultaneously as specification languages and as vehicles for encoding problem solving approaches. Languages of this kind support what is known as the declarative approach to programming, and many such languages have been developed in recent years by exploiting the rich connections between the ideas of logical deduction and computation. The implementation of these languages is a challenging task given their distance from actual computers and my research also addresses this issue.
Baoquan Chen
Computer Graphics and Scientific Visualization
(612) 625-5072
baoquan@cs.umn.edu
http://www.cs.umn.edu/~baoquan
The past three decades have witnessed a proliferation of polygon-based graphics systems. Yet in such systems, triangle facets only approximate the shape of objects. With the advent of advanced biomedical instruments and scientific simulations, we are coping more and more with three-dimensional data sets such as Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI), Computed Tomography (CT), 3D ultra-sound, and Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD). Volume rendering provides a powerful mechanism to visualize this data's complicated internal structures that polygon rendering can not convey. My main research effort is on designing novel algorithms and hardware to speed up volume rendering and the rendering of scenes represented by a mixture of polygons (opaque and/or translucent) and volume data while increasing the realism, thereby enabling scientists to perform more advanced investigations.