July 22, 1996
Salesin takes UW undergraduates to the forefront of computer graphics
As University of Washington senior Brad West prepared to graduate this June and begin his career, he was in the enviable position of having top computer graphics companies calling him. Fellow senior Li-Wei He already is working for local software giant Microsoft Corp. Chuck Jacobs and Corey Anderson, also seniors, have their pick of top programs nationwide to pursue graduate degrees.
These undergraduate students made names for themselves in the cutting-edge field of computer graphics while working with David Salesin, associate professor of computer science and engineering at the UW. Salesin is the only professor at the UW and possibly in the nation to have received a Presidential Faculty Fellow Award, National Science Foundation and Office of Naval Research Young Investigator awards and an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship. In May, he received a UW College of Engineering Award for Outstanding Faculty Achievement.
Salesin’s most recent achievement is having eight full-length research papers accepted for publication at the 1996 SIGGRAPH conference, the Association of Computing Machinery’s international computer graphics meeting that attracts more than 30,000 people from academia and industry. Computer graphics is different from most other technical fields in that leading work is presented in heavily referereed conferences rather than journals, explained Ed Lazowska, chairman of the Department of Computer Science and Engineering. The 1996 SIGGRAPH (Special Interest Group on Graphics) conference will be Aug. 4-9 in New Orleans.
“I don’t think anybody has ever submitted eight papers before, and to have them all accepted is certainly exciting,” said Salesin, 35, who worked with Lucasfilm Ltd. and computer graphics innovator Pixar before completing his doctorate at Stanford University and joining the UW faculty in 1992.
Previously, the record for SIGGRAPH papers published by a single person in a year was held by a Stanford University professor who had four full papers and one short paper accepted in 1993. With only 52 of 247 submissions accepted for publication at the
1996 conference, Salesin’s eight papers represent 15 percent of the featured research. What sets the achievement apart even further is that four of the papers were co-authored by UW undergraduates.
“It’s a pretty big deal to have a SIGGRAPH paper on your resume; it’s a pretty big deal to have any publications listed on your resume as an undergraduate,” said West, a 21-year-old from southern California. West has worked with Salesin for nearly a year on a system to reproduce color images with duotone, or two-ink, processing and achieve the same quality as more expensive, four-color processing. “My research experience makes me 100 times more attractive to industry. When your name is on a paper with David Salesin, that pretty much gets companies calling you.”
Jacobs, 28, of Issaquah helped Salesin develop software that allows users to sketch a picture with a mouse and search the World Wide Web for images that most closely match the sketch. Anderson, a 19-year-old Tukwila resident, has worked with Salesin on a program that automatically renders black-and-white photographs as pen-and-ink illustrations. The opportunity to plan and conduct research as undergraduates was one of the things that attracted Jacobs and Anderson to the UW.
“Usually undergraduates are hired to do simple programming; Professor Salesin allows undergraduates to help lead the research,” added Li-Wei He, a 22-year-old native of China who is working with Salesin and Microsoft on virtual cinematography software that provides movie-like video representations of on-line chat worlds in real time. “The research enhances education because computer technology is always changing. You have to keep learning, and the best way to do that is through conducting research and making new discoveries. There aren’t very many professors like Professor Salesin who give so much responsibility for research to undergraduates.”
Salesin claims only to be providing the same opportunities he was given as an undergraduate at Brown University in the early 1980s. He identifies strong students in his introductory computer graphics course, invites them to be teaching assistants and hires the best of the best to help him with research. If this year’s SIGGRAPH success is any indication, the formula seems to be working.
“I try to get undergraduates involved in every part of the research process, from planning and implementing what we do to collecting the results and writing and presenting the papers,” Salesin said. “They’re a big part of this success.”
For more information, contact Salesin at (206) 685-1227 or salesin@cs.washington.edu.
