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Speaker:
Prof. Dr. Rüdiger Westermann, Technical University Munich, Germany
Date: Thursday, 10 April 2025, 17:15
Location: room BIN 2.A.01 at the Department of Informatics (IfI), Binzmühlestrasse 14, 8050 Zürich
Details about the format of the talk shall be checked always just ahead of a certain presentation date: (information here)
Gradient-based optimization is a mathematical approach used to find the optimal solution to a problem by iteratively adjusting the decision variables based on the gradient of an objective function. It is widely used in engineering, machine learning, and various scientific disciplines due to its efficiency in handling high-dimensional and continuous optimization problems. In this talk I will discuss various applications of gradient-based optimization in scientific visualization, with the objective being either the generation of an accurate visual depiction of a volumetric scalar field, or the reconstruction of such a field from given images. I will demonstrate that the use of gradient-based optimization can reduce the memory and computational resources required in image synthesis tasks, and leads to advance computational performance and various applications in volume reconstruction tasks. Specifically, I will address super-resolution volume rendering and volume compression with neural networks, cinematic volume rendering with differentiable 3D Gaussian splatting, and image-based volume reconstruction with automatic differentiation.
Rüdiger Westermann is a Professor for computer science at the Technical University of Munich. He is head of the chair for computer graphics and visualization. After his PhD in computer science he joined the computer graphics group at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg as a research scientist. Before he became an assistant professor in the visualization group at the University of Stuttgart he was a research assistant in the mulitres group at Caltech and a visiting professor with the scientific computing laboratory at the University of Utah. In 2001 he was appointed by the RWTH-Aachen as an associate professor for scientific visualization in the department of computer science. Since 2003, Rüdiger Westermann is chair of the computer graphics and visualization group at TUM. He was honored an ERC Advanced Grant for research in the area
of uncertainty visualization, and he served as a PI in the DFG funded center of excellence Waves2Weather. His current research interests include realtime graphics and interactive visual data analysis, topology optimization and GPU compute.
