Spring 2010 ♦ Issue Forty-five CompSci @ Carolina
Dear Friends,
It has been a particularly unusual winter weather-wise in Chapel Hill, with more snow than we’ve seen
in quite a while, though still not a lot by most standards. Spring is nearly here, however, and soon we will
be graduating another class of graduate and undergraduate students and sending them on their way into
the world. Our collective hope is that we’ve prepared them well for the world they will enter.
This year, UNC is celebrating 50 years of computing at Carolina. Sponsored jointly by UNC’s Informa¬
tion Technology Services, the Department of Computer Science and the School of Information and
Library Science, the celebration honors the dedication of UNC’s Computation Center on March 30,
1960. Fittingly, Fred Brooks is giving the keynote address at the event.
Congratulations to Dinesh Manocha on being named an ACM Fellow. It is a well-deserved honor.
Congratulations also to Liangjun Zhang, who graduated in 2009 and was, incidentally, advised by Dinesh, on receiving
UNC’s Linda Dvkstra Distinguished Dissertation Award in Mathematics, Physical Sciences and Engineering for 2010. The
award recognizes one dissertation in each of four categories each year as being the best at UNC. You can read more about
Zhang on page 4.
Finally, I’d like to thank those of you who have supported the department financially in the past and encourage all of you
who can to do so in the future. Your donations make a real difference to the department, especially in these tough eco¬
nomic times. So, thank you for donating!
AVATARS AND BATHYSPHERES
Imagine you wanted to attend SIG-
GRAPH. Your current options would be
to either go there physically or to not go
and, perhaps, watch some video of some
of the proceedings online. It wouldn’t be
very exciting for someone who couldn’t
attend in person.
However, what if you weren’t able to at¬
tend in person but you could attend SIG-
GRAPH virtually, using a physical avatar
that could move around and interact with
others at the conference?
If Research Associate Professor Greg
Welch (Ph.D. 1996) has his way, that will
be an option for you in the future. Welch,
along with Professor Henry Fuchs, is lead¬
ing the development of dynamic physical
avatars that mimic the motion and ap¬
pearance of a real person.
They have developed a head-only proof-
of-concept avatar system comprised of a
camera, a tracking system, a digital pro¬
jector, and a life-sized Styrofoam head
mounted on a pan-tilt unit.
In order to make the avatar come to life,
they capture imagery of a moving, talk¬
ing user (a real person), and use Shader
Lamps, a way of “painting” white physi¬
cal objects with digital light, and other
new methods to retarget the shape, mo¬
tion, and dynamic appearance to the ani-
matronic avatar. This approach inherently
provides a sense of physical shape, natu¬
rally accommodating all nearby observers
without the need for head worn displays,
glasses, or tracking systems.
continued on page 2
In this issue
1 Avatars and
Bathyspheres
3 Department News
4 Manocha named ACM
Fellow
4 Zhang receives
Distinguished
Dissertation award
5 Alumni profile- Matt
Cutts
6 Alumni News
6 Family Matters
7 Recent publications
8 Bardez fund still going
strong
