Opp: Johns Hopkins U Applied Physics Lab is hiring at all levels

Folks,

Chris Sexton, a former lab member, tells us that Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab, which does a great deal of government contracting, is hiring at all levels.

If you're curious about what it's like to work there, feel free to get in touch with him.

Best,

Ben

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Sexton, Christopher G. (A4C) <Christopher.G.Sexton@jhuapl.edu>
Date: Mon, Oct 5, 2009 at 12:59 PM
Subject: FW: College Relations Networking
To: "bwatson@ncsu.edu" <bwatson@ncsu.edu>

Hi Ben,

 

Just passing this way, in case you have any students that would be looking for employment anytime soon. APL is doing a lot of hiring in some relevant areas (graphics, math, physics, etc).

 

Regards,

Chris

 

From: Murphy, Stacy D.
Sent: Monday, October 05, 2009 12:55 PM
Cc: +College Recruiting Office
Subject: College Relations Networking

 

Greetings from the APL College Recruiting Office,

 

The APL College Recruiting Office is actively recruiting again for new graduates (BS/MS/PhD) for full-time technical professional opportunities here at APL. We are contacting you because you were hired through our office in the last year or so and may be able to assist us with our recruiting and outreach efforts currently underway at the universities where we recruit.

 

We would be very appreciative if you would be willing to share any contacts you have with faculty, advisors, or colleagues at your respective alma maters that you think might be willing to refer strong candidates (like yourselves) that would be a good fit for APL.  If you have a name and/or contact information of anyone that you feel we should be reaching out to we would love to hear from you.

 

Likewise,  if you have friends still attending university and are close to graduating that might be a fit, we would love to speak to them about possible employment opportunities for them here at APL.

 

If you have any questions please feel free to contact me by phone or email.

 

Thank you,

Stacy D. Murphy

College Recruiting Manager

Employment Systems and College Recruiting
Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory
11100 Johns Hopkins Road
Laurel, Maryland 20723

(443)778-8227
(301)362-8248 Fax 
Stacy.Murphy@jhuapl.edu

 

  

 

--
Benjamin Watson
Design Graphics Lab
Associate Professor
Dept. Computer Science
North Carolina State University
EBII 2280, 890 Oval Dr, Box 8206
Raleigh, NC 27695-8206
Phone: 919-513-0325
Fax: 919-515-7896
Lab: 919-513-0847
Email: bwatson@ncsu.edu
URL: http://designgraphics.ncsu.edu/

Hey all,

Last week we finished our examination of High Performance Rendering conference proceedings. You can find the proceedings online here. (If you don't have NCSU/ACM access, you can find most of the content here, along with many of the talk slides).

You can find a last of papers we discussed in some depth after the break.

Best,

Ben

Read more »

Hack: Non-Adobe PDF plugins in Chrome

If you like Chrome and hate Acrobat PDF, this hack is for you.

Acrobat Reader is slow, crash-prone and intrusive. Chrome is fast and clean, but not obviously friendly to Acrobat alternatives.

Here's how to make it friendly:

• Locate the Firefox plugin for your favorite Acrobat Reader replacement (check these general and Windows specific lists). In Windows, this is typically this is in the reader's Program Files directory. Mine is at: C:\Program Files\Tracker Software\PDF Viewer\npPDFXCviewNPPlugin.dll.
• Locate the Chrome plugin directory. Mine is at C:\Documents and Settings\Ben\Local Settings\Application Data\Google\Chrome\Application\Plugins.
• Put a copy of your preferred reader plugin into the Chrome plugin directory.
• Restart Chrome.

And you're done.

Eagerly awaiting the update to Chrome that officially adds plugins....

Best,

Ben

Meet: Abs & pics -- ACM CHI 2009

Hey all,

We went fairly quiet over the summer, but that doesn't mean we weren't meeting. We continued our discussion of the spring's ACM CHI conference. We thought these papers were interesting:

• PenLight: combining a mobile projector and a digital pen for dynamic visual overlay, Song, Grossman, Fitzmaurice, Guimbretiere, Khan, Attar and Kurtenbach. A paper about pens that contain both camera and projector, enabling the projection of additional layers of content onto architectual drawings, in an augmented reality fashion that is properly registered with the drawing content.
• The performance of touch screen soft buttons, Lee and Zhang. Examined the use of buttons on small UIs, such as phones. They found, surprisingly, that hard buttons were no better than soft, and capacitive (touch) buttons no better than resistive (pressure). Perhaps the hard/soft surprise might be explained by the distance between display and input with hard buttons, and the display/keyboard unification with soft? As to the capacitive/resistive surprise, certainly capacitive would win with gestures, and maybe also with more prolonged use. Finally we note that all the tasks here used numeric keys only, which allowed the use of larger keys. Would the results hold for typing text with smaller keys?
• NewsCube: delivering multiple aspects of news to mitigate media bias, Park, Kang, Chung and Song. A news browser for depicting all the sides of a newsstory ("aspects"). It uses keyword clustering to identify aspects, and in an informal evaluation, helped users identify aspects.
• Comparing usage of a large high-resolution display to single or dual desktop displays for daily work,Bi and Balakrishnan. This paper studied the use of a large (16' x 6', 6k x 2k pixels) display for several days of daily use. It found that users preferred large displays to small, that they made heavy use of the central display area with a focal/peripheral work pattern, and that interface operations mirror this. They suggest that applications and interfaces be designed to support this work pattern by having focal and peripheral modes, and operations that simplify switching between the modes.

There were other papers that also sounded interesting, but we didn't have time to examine them together.

Best,

Ben

Meet: Abs & pics -- High Performance Graphics 2009

Update: my back of the envelope below was a few orders of magnitude off! Three to be exact.

***

Hey all,

For the last two weeks, we've been skimming the High Performance Rendering conference proceedings (the merger of Graphics Hardware with Interactive Ray Tracing). You can find the proceedings online here. (If you don't have NCSU/ACM access, you can find most of the content here, along with many of the talk slides). There were two keynotes at the event; one in particular was given by Epic Games cofounder Tim Sweeney, responsible for the Unreal engines and games. The guys who authored the book Real Time Rendering blogged the whole event.

Two weeks ago we began looking over the papers and discussed a few in a bit of depth:

• A Parallel Algorithm for Construction of Uniform Grids, Kalojanov and Slusallek. A GPU-based method for gridding 3D geometry in real time.
• Scaling of 3D Game Engine Workloads on Modern Multi-GPU Systems,
  Monfort and Grossman. Studying methods for synchronizing systems using multiple GPUs.
• Embedded Function Composition, Whitted, Kajiya, Ruf and Bittner. As displays grow in size and resolution, input bandwidths cannot continue to grow with the number of pixels. The authors tackle this problem by embedding processors in displays, enabling the use of higher level primitives in communication with displays.
• Efficient Depth Peeling via Bucket Sort, Fang Liu, Meng-Cheng Huang, Xue-Hui Liu, and En-Hua Wu. Depth peeling is a hardware method for sorting geometry in depth. This paper describes a technique that avoids the need for multiple passes.
• Data-Parallel Rasterization of Micropolygons With Defocus and Motion Blur, Fatahalian, Luong, Boulos, Akeley, Mark and Hanrahan. The future of interactive rendering will involve film techniques. This paper describes hardware methods for REYES-like rendering.

Last week we continued our discussion and spent most of the time talking about Tim Sweeney's keynote talk on the future of interactive rendering. He made several interesting points:

• The GPU shader programming model is limited and will not scale
• Interactive graphics will use more techniques from film
• It will require much more parallelism
• In software, this will require high level, functional programming and a new style of vectorization
• In hardware, this will require 4 tflops of computing, and 4 tBps of bandwidth!

To give you an idea of what that last stat means, that is about 16,000 1M pixel textures read per frame. I have to ask, are pixels the right primitive to be pushing around at these bandwidths?

Next week we'll finish our discussion of this event.

Best,

Ben.

Find: Martin Wattenberg et al on email research

http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/159578255-44940706/content~content=a784768001~db=all~jumptype=rss

Sent from my iPhone

Find: data.gov and competition

Hello all,

The guv'ment is beginning to make their stuff digitally transparent (long way to go). Their data repository is at data.gov. The Sunlight Foundation has a competition for visualizing this new info.

Best,

Ben.

Find: Google Wave video

From DGL lab member Tyler Arehart: An hour and 20 minutes of google wave.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v_UyVmITiYQ. Opinions?

Find: Sharp's new color gamut

From DGL alum Alex Kuhl:

Sharp is improving the color gamut on monitors, here's a little
information about how they are going about it.

http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/news/2009/06/expanding-the-gamut-sharp-to-increase-color-range-of-lcds.ars