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The NVidia GTC is only 2 weeks away (I’m going, are you?) and the details are firming up as to what will be happening when.  Over at the NVidia Ntersect blog, they’ve got a great list of some talks to check out if you’re into video processing, editing, image processing, or other special areas:

If you’re in the business of developing breakthroughs in visualization and imaging, then you won’t want to miss the GPU Technology Conference next month. With over 250 technology sessions presented by industry luminaries, there’s a wealth of information being shared, including tracks devoted to exploring new techniques in the graphics and visualization space involving ray tracing, image processing, video processing and medical imaging.

For content production, attendees can learn about how mental images’ iray interactive ray tracing is being leveraged in applications to streamline product development, and how the OptiX application acceleration engine can be integrated into your own application. There are several great sessions on ray tracing and other rendering techniques, including:

via The NVIDIA Blog – GPU Technology Conference Highlights: Visualization and Imaging.

Science conference, gtc, nvidia

To generate some buzz for the Web2.0 summit they created a fun map of the major web properties and social networks on an interactive website so that you can pan and zoom, and then watch how the various “countries” have begun to encroach on each other.

More than any time in the history of the Web, incumbents in the network economy are consolidating their power and staking new claims to key points of control.

Meanwhile, insurgents both large and small are hoping to gain footholds or take ground in new territories.

Welcome to the first iteration of the Web 2.0 Summit’s theme, Points of Control!

via The Web 2.0 Summit Points of Control Map.

Graphics conference, map, web

Daden Limited is creating an interactive map, both on the web and in Second Life, of virtual world based scientific research and educational activities in the UK as part of the upcoming British Science Festival at Aston University.

Daden Managing Director, David Burden, said; “We know that there is a lot of UK science and Higher Education activity within virtual worlds but is hard to visualise the scale and scope of activity without seeing it on a map. We hope that this map will inform people about projects they didn’t know about – and encourage them to visit. We want it to become a lasting resource for UK Science which can live on beyond this year’s British Science Festival.”

So fire up your SL viewer and go check it out, or go to their website and see it there.

Full release after the break.

Read more…

Science conference, daden, second life, virtual worlds

Lightworks senior software engineer Neil Gatenby will be keynoting the upcoming Theory & Practice of Computer Graphics conference in England, September 6-8th.

Neil’s talk, entitled “Ridge walks in the graphics highlands, avoiding the falls, reaching the summit” will address the issues and complexities that can arise when writing a high performance photorealistic renderer. He will discuss the use of GPU and CPU multi-processing as well as global illumination and anti-aliasing techniques.

Full release after the break.

Read more…

Science conference, lightworks

The SC09 folks have posted the video of the community visualizations contributed to the conference online, and it shows several examples of some great visualization and research.  Quick run through of the hour long video shows several virtual worlds running in Second Life and ScienceSim, some interesting scientific visualizations, some collaborative and experimental hardware systems, and lots of cutting edge science.

You can download the “reduced resolution” Version here (250MB), or the full-resolution (1GB+) file at their site.

SC09 – SC09 Visualizations.

Science conference, sc09

The 6th annual Second Life Community Convention will be happening this weekend in Boston and in-world, bringing together virtual world admirers and users to discuss technology, learn new skills, and network with some of the biggest names in the industry.

The Second Life Community Convention is a conference organized for Second Life residents by Second Life residents, including teens – there’s something for everyone! Content creators, artists, and musicians attend to share ideas, get creative, and learn new techniques from the pros. Enterprise users and businesses discuss strategies for success and techniques for maximum ROI. Educators present research, best practices, and workshops. The list goes on and on! From casual users, community groups, and roleplayers to the serious side of Second Life, come to the conference to learn, share, and network with the real people behind the avatars!

Philip Rosedale is already on tap for a keynote, as are Doug Thompson, John Lester, and Sarah Hutchinson.  If you’re into virtual worlds (not just Second Life), then this definitely sounds like the event for you.  And, you don’t even need to leave your couch!

via General Info – SLCC – Official United States Convention of the Second Life Community | Boston | August 13-15, 2010.

Science conference, second life, virtual worlds

metaio has formally announced the 2010 ‘insideAR’ conference on Augmented Reality, to be held September 27th in Munich.

The insideAR augmented reality conference by metaio is a comprehensive overview about state of the art technology and business opportunities in the growing field of connecting real and virtual worlds. You will have the chance to get in touch with our R&D or application development specialists as well as our partners and international experts from various industries. See the applications of tomorrow and get insights from our best-practice examples in marketing, e- and mobile commerce, gaming, publishing, IT and industrial applications. When you think that augmented reality will change the way we look at the world, insideAR 2010 will change the way you look at the technology.

Information is still sparse, but registration is open now!

via Augmented Reality, Mixed, software, product, systems, solutions, consulting, applications, presentation: insidear.

Science augmented reality, conference, metaio

NVidia has published the agenda for the upcoming GPU Technology Conference online, and it looks like an amazing collection of talks.  Many people today claim GPU’s are unnecessary for compute because the CPU can match it in speed, but leave out the part about new and future algorithms that could easily put the power back in the GPU court.  Looks like NVidia has gone out of their way to collect speakers to drive this point home.  Look at some of the briefs.  CFD Simulations:

Shockingly Fast and Accurate CFD Simulations (#2078) – Timothy Warburton, Rice University

In the last three years we have demonstrated how GPU accelerated discontinuous Galerkin methods have enabled simulation of time-dependent, electromagnetic scattering from airplanes and helicopters. In this talk we will discuss how we have extended these techniques to enable GPU accelerated simulation of supersonic airflow as well.

Biomedical Imaging:

Nearly Instantaneous Reconstruction for MRIs (#2094) – General Electric

GE’s Autocalibrating Reconstruction for Cartesian Imaging (ARC) is a computationally intensive, widely used algorithm in MRI Reconstruction using Parallel Imaging. We demonstrate that an optimized CUDA implementation of ARC on a GPU can enable nearly instantaneous reconstruction and speedups of up to 10x over an optimized dual socket QuadCore CPU implementation. We will discuss challenges both with computational intensity and data read/write efficiency. We will also compare the Fermi C2050 with the C1060.

The Large Hadron Collider:

Processing Petabytes per Second at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN (#2135) – Philip Clark, University of Edinburgh; Andy Washbrook, University of Edinburgh

Learn how GPUs could be adopted by the ATLAS detector at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN. The detector, located at one of the collision points, must trigger on unprecedented data acquisition rates (PB/s), to decide whether to record the event, or lose it forever. In the beginning we introduce the ATLAS experiment and the computational challenges it faces. The second part will focus on how GPUs can be used for algorithm acceleration – using two critical algorithms as exemplars. Finally, we will outline how GPGPU acceleration could be exploited and incorporated into the future ATLAS computing framework.

Entertainment (You didn’t think I’ld leave you out, did you?):

Developing GPU Enabled Visual Effects For Film And Video (#2125) – Bruno Nicoletti, The Foundry; Jack Greasley, The Foundry

The arrival of fully programmable GPUs is now changing the visual effects industry, which traditionally relied on CPU computation to create their spectacular imagery. Implementing the complex image processing algorithms used by VFX is a challenge, but the payoffs in terms of interactivity and throughput can be enormous. Hear how The Foundry’s novel image processing architecture simplifies the implementation of GPU-enabled VFX software and eases the transition from a CPU based infrastructure to a GPU based one.

Rendering Revolution (#2165) – Ken Pimentel, Autodesk

Learn how GPU technologies are transforming the making of pixels. This talk will cover GPU-centric rendering techniques that leverage both the raw computational capabilities of NVIDIA’s GPUs and advanced pixel-shading techniques for interactive visualization and rendering.

Looks like a great event this year, be sure to check out the entire agenda by day or by session.  What else do you see that looks interesting? Post in the comments!

Science conference, gpgpu, gtc, nvidia

If you’re going to SIGGRAPH, then let CGSociety do some of the legwork parsing the massive schedule into some production focused items.

On Sunday July 25, 25,000 or so CG artists, scientists, technical wizards, product developers, and lookielous descend on the Los Angeles convention center ready to learn, interact, teach, people watch, play, buy and sell. This amazing digital art and technology circus continues until Thursday, and it’s packed with the most valuable, interesting, and incredible sessions you could wish for.

We cherry picked a few with a decided slant toward production. We didn’t sort through the technical papers – if you can read math, you’re already on the website checking them out. And we separated out most of the courses from everything else, because if you want in, you probably need to sign up . . . right . . . now. OK, here goes!

via CGSociety – SIGGRAPH 2010 Diary.

Graphics conference, siggraph

Autodesk is preparing for Autodesk University 2010, to be held in Las Vegas November 30-December 2nd.  They’ve got a huge amount of content lined up, so far totaling 600 topics and 400 speakers.

Autodesk University is for industry professionals who want to learn more about their current Autodesk products, network with other like professionals, and help their companies stay on the cutting edge of design.

We know you know how beneficial attending Autodesk University is to your career and your company. But sometimes upper management may not know. Here, then, are a few suggestions that might help you better position the value your company will gain from sending you to AU.

Full details are at their site, including a great writeup from Lynn Allen on some reasons to use to convince your employer to foot the bill.  The event looks heavily skewed toward CAD tho, based on comments like this:

You’ll learn from top-rated working professionals in the fields of AEC, Automotive and Transportation, CAD Management, Civil Engineering, Drafting, Education, Government, Manufacturing, Media & Entertainment, Geospatial, Utilities & Communication, Visualization, and many more.

So folks who use 3dsMax in the Animation & Graphics fields may want to pass.

via Lynn Allen’s Top Eight Reasons for Attending AU.

Graphics autodesk, conference