February 20, 2006 Source: University of Toronto:
http://www.news.utoronto.ca/bin6/060220-2082.asp Speaking graphically: Computer science professor brings natural world to life Researcher challenged with converting visual images into mathematical models for software applications
Feb 20/06
by Elizabeth Raymer Eugene Fiume loves the Italian countryside, the Côte d’Azur, the pond and the forest surrounding his Aurora home. In fact, says the professor and past chair of computer science, "I love the look of the world," and computer graphics can help capture a bit of its beauty. One of Fiume’s areas of specialty is realistic computer graphics, in which he looks at these things people find beautiful in everyday life and tries to model them mathematically and computationally. "Our job as researchers in computer graphics is to capture the visual aspect of these things as mathematical models and then to develop software that hides the mathematical details from artists and designers who want to work directly with the creation of convincing images," Fiume says. Some early work included modelling of smoke and clouds, and more recently, he’s studied human bodies: how one moves bodies and makes movement expressive. "I’m promiscuous in my choice of research topics," says Fiume, who recently submitted a research paper on how one moves the branches and leaves on a tree or shrub — and how that translates to computer graphics that animators can use. "It’s very interesting, in the past few years, to look at the world and pull from it things you can’t see but can make move," he says. "You look at a person whose hair is blowing in the wind. We’d like to extract the wind field that made the hair move" and then add other things to the graphic, like grass, and have them move in the same way. The child of Italian immigrants, Fiume says explaining to his Italian relatives what he does for a living is almost impossible in Calabrese, their native dialect. Automatic simulation, turbulence and chaos aren’t words that exist in that southern Italian dialect. "I found it very interesting to try to find the words to explain to my grandmother what I did. I had to do it with video, visually," he says, noting that he had to explain to her that it was simulation. "To this day, that makes me think about what it is to be real," he says, "what’s illusion, what’s deception." Fiume is concerned that sophisticated computer graphics could be used deceptively because of "how easy it is to create artificial realities." Politics may be an area particularly open to manipulating images and potentially propagating distortions, he suggests. But other kinds of technology will also be developed to offset these distortions, he predicts, such as "a huge spam filter." What’s more detailed or realistic isn’t necessarily more believable, he adds. Viewers looking at realistic animations of faces immediately notice what’s wrong — that the images aren’t real — and they are perceived to be zombie-like, he says. But if the graphics are reduced to lines, like eyebrow squiggles, the faces seem more human and believable. Along with realistic computer graphics, Fiume’s research interests include Internet-based imaging, image repositories, software systems and parallel algorithms. He has written two books, An Introduction to Scientific, Symbolic and Graphical Computation (1995) and The Mathematical Structure of Raster Graphics (1989), and has been involved in projects on the biomechanical and biomedical side, working with U of T researchers in computer science, anatomy and medicine. "How does muscle work? How does the hand work? It’s a tremendously complex thing and the visual component is very important. [Computer graphics] shows a promise of visualization technologies married to therapies, or old-fashioned illustration. It’s using visual processes to help understand a lot of mysterious behaviours in the world, including our bodies."
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