Colloquy Cycle on Monday, October 22, 2018 - 10:00

Synthesizing images that cannot be distinguished from photographs has been the holy grail of
computer graphics for long. With the path tracing revolution in the movie industry, high quality image synthesis is finally based on ray tracing. With the advent of hardware for accelerated ray tracing, the challenge now is to simulate light transport in realtime. We therefore introduce the relations of the integral equation ruling light transport and reinforcement learning and then survey the building blocks that will enable global illumination simulation in realtime.

Short Bio

Alexander Keller is a director of research at NVIDIA. Before, he had been the Chief Scientist of mental images, where he had been responsible for research and the conception of future products and strategies including the design of the NVIDIA Iray renderer. Prior to industry, he worked as a full professor for computer graphics and scientific computing at Ulm University, where he co-founded the UZWR (Ulmer Zentrum für wissenschaftliches Rechnen) and received an award for excellence in teaching. Alexander Keller holds a PhD, authored more than 27 granted patents, and published more than 50 research articles.

Alexander Keller leads and pursues foundational and applied research in the fields of computer graphics, simulation, quasi-Monte Carlo methods, and machine learning for more than 25 years. He has pioneered quasi-Monte Carlo methods for light transport simulation and initiated the fastest and most robust ray tracing technologies. His research results are manifested in industry leading products like mental ray or NVIDIA Iray aside from many more implementations in academic and professional software and products.