Keynote and Invited Speakers

Keynote Speaker:
Thomas C. Bickel (Sandia National Laboratories)
Thomas Bickel attended Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas. He received a Bachelors of Science degree with honors in Engineering Science in 1973. He attended the University of Texas, receiving a Ph.D. degree in Chemical Engineering in 1978. His graduate work was in the field of nonlinear, integer programming. Education honors included Trinity Presidential Scholarship, Alpha Chi National Honor Society, Omega Chi Epsilon National Chemical Engineering Society, Tau Beta Pi National Engineering Honor Society, Shell Foundation Fellowship, and Phillips Petroleum Fellowship.

Dr. Bickel has been employed at Sandia National Laboratories since 1978. From 1978 through 1990, as a Member of the Technical Staff, he performed research in areas of chemical kinetics, heat transfer and multiphase fluid dynamics of fossil fuels, and applied geophysics of petroleum reservoirs. Dr. Bickel left Sandia National Laboratories for a brief period in 1981 to become manager of the Engineering Department at Vedette Energy Company. He was responsible for the thermal and chemical performance of the Down-Hole Steam Generator for secondary and tertiary oil recovery. He subsequently returned to Sandia and was principal investigator on the joint Occidental Oil Shale/DOE Modified In Situ Oil Shale retorts 7 and 8, geophysical simulation and modeling of the surface electric potential of oil reservoirs, and high-temperature superconductivity material science research and application development.

In 1990 Dr. Bickel was appointed a Distinguished Member of the Technical Staff in recognition of his work in energy research. In 1991 Dr. Bickel became a Division Supervisor with responsibility for High-Temperature Superconductivity and Optical Properties Research. Subsequently, he was given responsibility of managing photovoltaic research on single-crystal and multicrystalline silicon materials and concentrating photovoltaic systems engineering.

In 1995 Dr. Bickel was appointed an American Society of Mechanical Engineers Federal Government Fellow attached to the Secretary of Energy Advisory Board in Washington, DC. He was the senior technical advisor to the Task Force on Strategic Energy Research and Development chaired by Dr. Daniel Yergin. At the completion of the Yergin Task Force, he became technical advisor to Deputy Secretary Charles Curtis and Pete Didisheim on the DOE Laboratory Operations Board, developing the Strategic Laboratory Missions Plan for the 28 DOE laboratory complex.

In 1996 Dr. Bickel returned to Sandia as the Manager of the Thermal Sciences Department, guiding work in massively parallel, computational simulation of the thermal response of nuclear weapons with programmatic responsibility for fundamental research in thermal sciences. In 1997 Dr. Bickel became the Deputy Director of the Engineering Sciences Center with responsibility for the stewardship of Engineering Sciences research and development at Sandia National Laboratories. He was subsequently appointed a Senior Manager. In 2000, Dr. Bickel was promoted to Director of Engineering Sciences at Sandia National Laboratories. In this role he has responsibility for the stewardship of R->D->A of the engineering disciplines at Sandia. With over 180 professional staff and a budget of $80M, he is responsible for the development of massively parallel computational mechanics software at Sandia as well as the experimental validation of the engineering models of the codes.

Dr. Bickel is a member of the American Institute of Chemical Engineers and the American Society of Mechanical Engineers. He is currently an Adjunct Professor of Chemical Engineering at the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology. He resides in Albuquerque, New Mexico with his wife Wendy and their three daughters. He is an Assistant Instructor in the National Association of Underwater Instructors and enjoys mountain biking and woodworking.

Invited Speakers:
Michael Garland (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign)
Michael Garland is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He received his Ph.D. in computer science from Carnegie Mellon University in 1999. His primary research interests focus on the creation, management, and rendering of visually complex scenes. For the last 10 years, he has been actively involved with developing techniques for automatic surface simplification and approximation, one of the primary results of this work being the widely used QSlim simplification system. More recently, he has worked on problems relating to automatic texture synthesis from example images, out-of core processing of multi-gigabyte meshes, automatic surface parameterization, and visualization of discontinuous Galerkin FEM simulations.

Abstract: Surface Approximation and Remeshing in Computer Graphics
Efficiently managing complex surface geometry is of fundamental importance in almost all graphics applications dealing with real-world data. At the heart of many of the problems encountered in such applications is the need to automatically adapt surface triangulations produced by laser scanners, isosurfacing of volume data, and similar systems. This talk will explore some of the primary techniques developed in this area, particularly surface simplification and remeshing methods. We will focus on the close connections between simplification/remeshing, parameterization, and graph partitioning.


Jami Shah (Arizona State University)
Dr. Jami J. Shah is Professor of Mechanical Engineering and Director of the Design Automation Lab at Arizona State University. He obtained his Ph.D. in ME at Ohio State in 1984 (Dissertation: "Non-linear FEA of buckling under combined loads"). Prior to his academic career that spans 19 years, he worked in industry for 6 years, designing machinery for steel and chemical industry. He has held visiting positions at GE, GM, Allied Signal, Phillips (Netherlands), UC Berkeley and Helsinki University of Technology. His research has been funded by Federal agencies (NSF, DARPA, ARO), consortiums (CAM-I, USCAR), and industry (GE, TI, GM, Ford, Boeing, HP, and others). He is the author of 2 US patents, 2 books, and more than 125 technical papers in professional journals and conferences. Dr. Shah is the founding chief editor of the newest ASME Transaction, the Journal of Computing & Information Science in Engineering(JCISE). He was elected Fellow of ASME in 2001.

Abstract: Evolution of geometric feature recognition techniques through four generations
Research in automatic feature recognition from 3D CAD models spans three decades. This talk will give a historical perspective of feature recognition methods. It will discuss the simple rule based systems of the 1970s, graph based systems of the 80s, volume decomposition and hint based systems of the 90s, and current hybrid systems. A very brief summary of the foundations of each approach and its limitations will be presented. The talk will also show snapshots of four generations of feature recognition systems developed in our lab. It will compare current feature recognition approaches from several criteria: robustness, computational complexity, range of features recognized, and extensibility. If time permits, work in progress in automatic recognition will be discussed.

Shang-Hua Teng (Boston University and Akamai Technologies Inc.)
Shang-Hua Teng is a full professor of Computer Science at Boston University and a senior research scientist at Akamai. He taught as a faculty at MIT, the University of Minnesota and UIUC, and worked at IBM Almaden, Intel, Xerox PARC, Cray Research/SGI, Thinking Machine Corporation, and NASA Ames Research Center. He is an Alfred P. Sloan Fellow, winner of Xerox Award for Outstanding Faculty Research, and has received NSF CAREER Award.

Teng received B.S. degrees in Computer Science and Electrical Engineering from Shanghai Jiao Tong University in 1985, the M.S. degree in Computer Science from University of Southern California in 1988, and the Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from CMU in 1991.

With Dan Spielman of MIT, he developed the theory of Smoothed Analysis for modeling and analyzing practical algorithms, and had demonstrated that the simplex method for linear programming has a polynomial smoothed complexity. This joint work was cited by National Science Foundation in its FY'03 budget request to Congress.

His research centers on effecient algorithm design and implementation. His recent interests include spectral techniques for optimization and information processing, parallel scientific computing, computational geometry, VLSI and circuit simulation, combinatorial optimization and probabilistic analysis, distributed computing and cryptography. He has also received several US Patents for his work on a compiler optimization and internet technologies.

Abstract: Generating Sliver-Free Well-Shaped Three Dimensional Delaunay Meshes
A mesh is cell-complex that decomposes a spatial domain for numerical simulation. Delaunay triangulations have many desirable properties for mesh generation. While there are several efficient methods for well-shaped 2D mesh generation, the generation of Delaunay meshes of well-shaped tetrahedra in 3D is considerably more difficult and has been an outstanding open problem for many years.

Most notably, slivers are notoriously common in three dimensional Delaunay meshes, where a sliver is a tetrahedron that has no short edge and whose four vertices lie closely to a great circle of its circum-sphere.

In this talk, I will survey the algorithmic and geometric techniques using weighted Delaunay triangulations and perturbations, that are recently developed for sliver removal. In particular, I will present the first Delaunay refinement algorithm, developed by Li and Teng, that always generates sliver free well-shaped unstructured meshes in three dimensions. The main ingredient of this algorithm is a novel refinement technique which systematically forbids the formation of slivers.

This talk contains collaborative works with Xiang-Yang Li, Siu-Wing Cheng, Tamal Dey, Herbert Edelsbrunner, Micheal Facello, Alper Ungor, Gary Miller, Dafna Talmor, and Noel Walkington.

Welcome Speaker:
Rob Leland (Sandia National Laboratories)
Robert Leland studied undergraduate electrical engineering with a minor in mechanical engineering at Michigan State University. He attended Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar and studied applied mathematics and computer science. There he completed a Ph.D. in Parallel Computing in 1989 and continued his studies as a National Science Foundation Graduate Fellow. He joined the Parallel Computing Sciences Department at Sandia National Laboratories in 1990 and pursued work principally in parallel algorithm development, sparse iterative methods and applied graph theory. There he co-authored Chaco, a graph partitioning and sequencing toolkit that is widely used to optimize parallel computations and which was a finalist in the Wilkinson competition for the best numerical software released in a four year period. In 1995 he worked for the White House as one of fourteen White House Fellows appointed that year by the President. His primary responsibility was to advise the Deputy Secretary and Secretary of the Treasury on technology modernization at the IRS. Upon returning to Sandia in 1996, he led the Parallel Computing Sciences Department, an R&D group of approximately 30 staff developing algorithmic technology and software tools in support of the Lab's supercomputing efforts. He also served part time for several years as a member of Sandia's Advanced Concepts Group studying long term national security issues. In 2001 he became responsible for Computer and Software Systems, a group of 80 staff members organized into four departments working on R&D in supercomputing hardware, operating systems, meshing and visualization.

Banquet Speaker:
Mark Shephard (Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute)
Professor Mark S. Shephard is the Samuel A. and Elisabeth C. Johnson, Jr. Professor of Engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. He holds joint appointments in the departments of Mechanical Engineering, Aeronautical and Nuclear Engineering; Computer Science; and Civil Engineering. He is the director of Rensselaer 's Scientific Computation Research Center. Dr. Shephard has published over 200 papers in the area of automated and adaptive finite element modeling. He is a fellow and past president of the US Association for Computational Mechanics, and was recipient of the 1997 USACM Computational and Applied Sciences Award; a fellow and member of the General Council of the International Association for Computational Mechanics; a fellow of ASME and an Associate Fellow of AIAA. He is editor of Engineering with Computers and on the editorial board of five computational mechanics journals.