Description

Lecture by Ivan Viola, Associate Professor of Computer, Electrical and Mathematical Science and Engineering at KAUST.

ABOUT THIS LECTURE

Computer graphics technology can nowadays interactively display billions of atoms forming structures up to entire biological organisms such as bacteria or Protista. The key insight that allows it is the following: while biology is immensely complex, it is also very repetitive, which could be exploited in coping with complexity. Life forms are internally composed of successful, frequently repeated evolutionary patterns. This repetition, or multi-instancing in our terminology, can be observed on every level of spatial organization. Thanks to such patterns, model construction of the entire life-form can be efficiently parallelized and consequently displayed using fast rendering routines, where both stages are executed on the graphics hardware. In terms of complexity, resulting scenes are of multi-scale, multi-instance, crowded, and dense three-dimensional nature. To effectively convey such a complex structural arrangement, visualization algorithms need to cope with all of these structural characteristics simultaneously. This need triggers the necessity of visualization algorithms that handle novel problems in 3D occlusion management, color assignment, shading, or visual guidance. All these new algorithms lead to a gradual democratization of computer graphics and visualization techniques for structural biology. Ultimately, the advances lead to new exciting ways of how biology can be explored, understood, and communicated in the future.

The Academic Lectures are a series of lectures featuring a range of in-Kingdom and international entrepreneurs, academics and distinguished guest speakers.

Check out this event’s photo gallery!

Watch this lecture!