Participant Testimonials
The BIRS workshop on interactive simulation equipped me with a fresh perspective on immersed B-spline methods in finite element analysis. I have been intrigued with these methods for quite some time, and it always seemed to me that they offered considerable promise. Until the BIRS workshop in Oaxaca two weeks ago, I had become quite discouraged by the lack of current research in this area. Thankfully, the workshop introduced me to three very interesting people who are actively pursuing these methods, and my faith has been fully restored. I am now contemplating a pilot project to explore their use on industrial problems, something I would not have considered except for this workshop.
MC 42-58, The Boeing Company
The workshop gave me a very good perspective on current work in the area of computational geometry. It was a very nice opportunity to present my current work and get interesting feedback from people both in academia and industry, which was very valuable.
The workshop at CMO-BIRS in Oaxaca offered a wonderful location to meet scientists from different areas. As I am in the transition from the PhD studies to a following activity, the mixture of academic and industrial backgrounds allowed me to collect experiences from different areas. Additionally, I could establish contacts there which might help for my future career. The size of the workshop with about 30 people even encouraged 1-on-1 discussions to all participants and everybody knew each others reasearch topics and problems. From the perspective of a researcher with a focus on the basics of the fundamental methods (FEM,...), it was very impressive to see their possibilities in an applied area as the computer graphics.
What I think was unique about this workshop compared to other workshops I have attended was that this workshop was quite successful in presenting the scientific challenges within the theme of the workshop (geometric modeling and computer graphics in a broad sense) from both academic and industry perspective. Most workshops have a similar structure in terms of a small number of participants and having people from both industry/nonprofit and academia but not many of them can provide an interesting and engaging interaction between both communities. I think I would attribute this success to both the choice of the participant as well as the style of the talks. The talks were longer than normal conference talks, interactive, and mostly targeted to "introducing what I do"! I really enjoyed the talks that were targeted to the introduction of the tools. Not only I learned about one(s) that I was not aware of (like SOFA), it also gave me a new perspective on the one(s) I use very often like CGAL. It was interesting for me to hear that the teams working on these tools actually do want to hear challenges their users have.
Department of Computer Science, University of Miami
This workshop was remarkable due to its blend of participants from different branches of academia, research labs and industry who share the common goal of improving the interface between geometry and computation for physical simulation. I specifically learned about resources in the form of new open-source software implementations of recent and new algorithms, and I obtained a deeper insight into the factors that are important to engineers and animators in physical simulation. In my upcoming sabbatical I plan to visit some of the researchers the workshop introduced me to. Due to the size the workshop, the length and depth of discussions was better than in larger North American and European workshop settings.
