Edwin Catmull

Dr. Ed Catmull is a co-founder of Pixar Animation Studios and the former president of Pixar, Walt Disney Animation Studios, and Disneytoon Studios. Dr. Catmull has been honored with five Academy Awards, including an Oscar of Lifetime Achievement for his technical contributions and leadership in the field of computer graphics for the motion picture industry. He was awarded the ACM Turing Award for his work on three-dimensional computer graphics in 2019 along with Prof Pat Harnahan of Stanford University. Dr. Catmull earned B.S. degrees in computer science and physics and a Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Utah

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Amanda Randles

Amanda Randles is the Alfred Winborne Mordecai and Victoria Stover Mordecai Assistant Professor of Biomedical Sciences at Duke University. She has courtesy appointments in the departments of Mechanical Engineering and Material Science, Computer Science and Mathematics, and is a member of the Duke Cancer Institute. Amongst other recognitions, she has received the ACM Grace Murray Hopper Award, IEEE-CS Technical Consortium on High Performance Computing (TCHPC) Award, the NIH Director’s Early Independence Award, the LLNL Lawrence Fellowship, and the ACM/IEEE George Michael Memorial High Performance Computing Fellowship. She was also named to the World Economic Forum Young Scientist List and the MIT Technology Review World’s Top 35 Innovators under the Age of 35 list and is a Senior Member of the National Academy of Inventors. Amanda received her Ph.D. in Applied Physics from Harvard University as a DOE Computational Graduate Fellow and NSF Fellow. Before that, she received her Master’s degree in Computer Science from Harvard University and her Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science and Physics from Duke University. Prior to graduate school, she worked as a software engineer at IBM on the Blue Gene supercomputing team. She has contributed over 40 peer-reviewed papers, over 100 granted US patents, and had over 100 pending patent applications.

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Kurt Mehlhorn

Kurt Mehlhorn is a Director of the Max Planck Institute (MPI) for Informatics and Professor of Computer Science at Saarland University. He heads the algorithms and complexity group at the MPI for Informatics. He co-authored some 300 publications in the field, published six books, and is one of the people behind the LEDA software library. He graduated more than 80 students, many of whom have now faculty positions. He has received several prizes (Leibniz Award, EATCS Award, Zuse Medal, ACM Paris Kanellakis Theory and Practice Award, Erasmus Medal of the Academia Europaea) for his work. He holds Honorary Doctorate Degrees from Magdeburg, Waterloo, Aarhus, Gothenburg and Patras universities and is an ACM Fellow. He is a member of the German Academy of Sciences Leopoldina, Academia Europaea, the German Academy of Science and Engineering acatech, the US Academy of Engineering, and the US Academy of Science. From 2002 to 2008, he was vice president of the Max Planck Society. He is a co-founder of Algorithmic Solutions Software GmbH.

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Milind Sohoni

Milind Sohoni received his BTech in CSE from IIT Bombay in 1986. He did his MS from Univ. of Illinois – Urbana Champaign, USA in 1998, and PhD from IIT Bombay in 1993. He is currently a Professor in CSE at IIT Bombay. Milind is known for his work in both theoretical computer science as well as in development theory and practice. In the area of development, he works on drinking water, and on higher education, especially on aligning engineering with development. He has also been the Head of CTARA, an academic center of IIT Bombay devoted to development.

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A Fireside Chat with Ed Catmull

Abstract: Ed Catmull proposed three ideas that transformed computer graphics fundamentally during his graduate student life at University of Utah: texture mapping, depth buffering, and subdivision surfaces. He also made real time, realistic animation as his mission through his time in NYIT, Lucasfilms, ILM, Pixar, and Walt Disney Animation Studios. It is not an exaggeration to state that his work touches every rendered pixel that we see on screen. In a freewheeling chat, Dr Catmull discusses his experiences at graduate school, in NYIT, and how the practice of computer-generated animation has changed over the years.

Interdisciplinarity and Engineering: The Road Ahead

Abstract: The talk will begin with an appreciation of what engineering means for a society and how to measure it. We then present some data on how engineering fares in Indian society and problem areas. I argue that (i) better but applicable research (ii) and creating entry points for entrepreneurs, will improve social outcomes. But this needs a different interdisciplinary outlook and training in field work, documentation and analysis. Given our systems-approach, the CS-IT graduate is specially well-equipped to undertake such work. I will look at public transport as a sector and illustrate this approach. We will first see the broad significance of the sector. Next, we will look at the taluka bus depot as an enterprise and the data sets by which they operate. We will then show how the notion of a Digital Geography can improve the analysis of their operations. In the second part, we will look at the transport system from outside, i.e., the question of how well is the taluka Bus Depot serving society. We will take the example of school-going children and their transport needs and analyse how well they are being provided. This will need supplementing the Digital Geography with additional (and easily available) socio-economic datasets. Finally, we argue that such analysis and the use of local data is essential for the training of the new engineer. Such skills will prepare the engineer as a social change-agent and an entrepreneur, and not merely an employee.

Almost Envy-Free Division of Indivisible Goods

Abstract: Fair division of indivisible goods is a basic problem in economics, law, computer science, and the social sciences. The goal is to distribute m goods to n agents in a fair manner. The goods are assumed to be indivisible. Every agent has a value (= a nonnegative number) for each subset of goods. In this setting, envy is unavoidable. Think of two agents and one good which both value. The agent that does not get the good will envy the agent that gets the good. The literature on fair division dates back more than 100 years. Fair division of divisible goods is also known as the cake-cutting problem. For this talk, fairness is envy-freeness up to any good (EFX). No agent should envy any other after the removal of any single good from the other agent’s bundle. It is not known whether or not such an allocation always exists. We survey results on fair division and sketch two results towards existence of EFX-allocations. 1. For additive valuations and three agents EFX-allocations exist (Bhaskar Ray Chaudhury, Jugal Garg, and Kurt Mehlhorn: EFX Exists for Three Agents. In EC ’20, pages 1–19). 2. There is always (Bhaskar Ray Chaudhury, Tellikepalli Kavitha, Kurt Mehlhorn, and Alkmini Sgouritsa: A Little Charity Guarantees Almost Envy-Freeness. In SODA ’20, pages 2658–2672) a partition of the good set X into n + 1 subsets (X1, . . . , Xn, P) such that
• the allocation (X1, . . . , Xn) is EFX,
• no agent values P (= the goods donated to charity) higher than her own bundle, and
• fewer than n goods go to charity, i.e., |P| < n (typically m » n).
Our proofs are constructive.

The role of massively parallel computing in personalized blood flow modeling

Abstract: The recognition of the role hemodynamic forces have in the localization and development of disease has motivated large-scale efforts to enable patient-specific simulations. When combined with computational approaches that can extend the models to include physiologically accurate hematocrit levels in large regions of the circulatory system, these image-based models yield insight into the underlying mechanisms driving disease progression and inform surgical planning or the design of next generation drug delivery systems. Building a detailed, realistic model of human blood flow, however, is a formidable mathematical and computational challenge. The models must incorporate the motion of fluid, intricate geometry of the blood vessels, continual pulse-driven changes in flow and pressure, and the behavior of suspended bodies such as red blood cells. In this talk, I will discuss the development of HARVEY, a parallel fluid dynamics application designed to model hemodynamics in patient-specific geometries. I will cover the methods introduced to reduce the overall time-to-solution and effectively leverage leadership class systems. Finally, I will discuss the role of personalized blood flow models for applications ranging from treatment planning for cardiovascular disease to studying cancer cell adhesion and metastatic progression.