Kavita Bala

Research

• Scalable illumination and rendering for high-complexity scenes
• Perceptually-based rendering and modeling
• Real-time global illumination
• Feature-based graphics
• Image-based rendering and texturing

Awards

• NSF CAREER Award, 2007
• James and Mary Tien Excellence in Teaching Award, College of Engineering, 2006
• Affinito-Stewart Award, PCCW, 2005

Recent Publications

	Perception of Complex Aggregates SIGGRAPH '08
	Fast Agglomerative Clustering for Rendering IRT '08
	Tensor Sampling for Rendering Many-Light Animations EGSR '08
	Scheduling Strategies for Optimistic Parallel Execution of Irregular Programs SPAA '08
	Single-pass Scalable Subsurface Rendering with Lightcuts Eurographics '08
	Dimensionality of Visual Complexity in Computer Graphics Scenes SPIE HVEI '08
	Optimistic Parallelism Benefits from Data Partitioning ASPLOS '08
	Advanced Global Illumination, 2nd edition Publisher A. K. Peters

Complete List of Publications...

Professional Activities

• Papers Co-chair, Eurographics Symposium on Rendering 2005
• Papers Program Committees:
  • 2008: SIGGRAPH Asia, Eurographics 08, Interactive 3D Graphics (I3D 08), Eurographics Symposium on Rendering (EGSR 08), Pacific Graphics 08, Interactive Ray Tracing 08, Symposium on Point-Based Graphics 08
  • 2007: SIGGRAPH 07, Symposium on Point-based Graphics (PBG 07), Pacific Graphics (PG 07), Interactive 3D Graphics (I3D 07)
  • 2006: SIGGRAPH 06, Symposium on Point-based Graphics (PBG 06), Eurographics Symposium on Rendering (EGSR 06), Symposium on Interactive Ray Tracing 06
  • 2005: Symposium on Point-based Graphics PBG 05, Graphics Interface 05
  • 2004: SIGGRAPH 04, Eurographics Symposium on Rendering (EGSR 04), Symposium on Point-based Graphics (PBG 04), Pacific Graphics 04
  • 2003: SIGGRAPH 03, Eurographics Symposium on Rendering (EGSR 03)
  • 2002: Eurographics Rendering Workshop EGWR 02
• Steering Committee, Symposium on Interactive Ray Tracing 07
• Posters Program Committee, SIGGRAPH 04

Courses

• CS 316, Cornell's Systems Programming (Fall 08, Fall 07)
• CS467/468, Cornell's Graphics II and Graphics Practicum (Spring 07, Spring 06, Spring 04)
• CS665, Cornell's graduate advanced interactive graphics course (Spring 08, Fall 06, Fall 04, Fall 03)
• ENGRG 150, Freshman advising (Fall 06)
• CS 718, Computer Graphics Seminar (Spring 07, Fall 04, Fall 03, Spring 03)
• Reusing Shading for Interactive Global Illumination (Game Developers Conference 04)
• Advanced Global Illumination (SIGGRAPH 02, SIGGRAPH 01)
• CS517, Cornell's graduate advanced graphics course (Fall 02, Fall 01)
• CS417 and CS 418, Cornell's introductory graphics course and practicum (Spring 02, Spring 01, Spring 00)

Books
	Phil Dutre, Kavita Bala, Philippe Bekaert.       Advanced Global Illumination      A K Peters, 2nd Edition      August 2006, Natick, MA      Bibtex
	Editors: Kavita Bala and Phil Dutre.       Rendering Techniques 2005      Springer Verlag      June 2005, Konstanz, Germany
	Phil Dutre, Philippe Bekaert, and Kavita Bala.       Advanced Global Illumination      A K Peters, 1st Edition      July 2003, Natick, MA      Bibtex
Journal, Conference, and Workshop papers
	Ganesh Ramanarayanan, Kavita Bala, James Ferwerda.      Perception of Complex Aggregates     SIGGRAPH '08     August 2008, Los Angeles CA      Project, Bibtex
	Bruce Walter, Kavita Bala, Milind Kulkarni, Keshav Pingali.      Fast Agglomerative Clustering for Rendering     Interactive Ray Tracing (IRT 2008)     August 2008, Los Angeles      Bibtex
	Milos Hasan, Edgar Velazquez-Armendariz, Fabio Pellacini, Kavita Bala.      Tensor Sampling for Rendering Many-Light Animations     Eurographics Symposium on Rendering (EGSR 2008)     June 2008, Sarajevo, Bosnia-Herzegovina      Project, Bibtex
	Milind Kulkarni, Keshav Pingali, Ganesh Ramanarayanan, Bruce Walter, Kavita Bala, Paul Chew.      Scheduling Strategies for Optimistic Parallel Execution of Irregular Programs     Symposium on Parallelism in Algorithms and Architectures (SPAA '08)     June 2008, Munich, Germany       Bibtex
	Adam Arbree, Bruce Walter, Kavita Bala.      Single-pass Scalable Subsurface Rendering with Lightcuts     Eurographics '08     April 2008, Crete      Project, Bibtex
	Ganesh Ramanarayanan, James Ferwerda, Bruce Walter, Kavita Bala.      Dimensionality of Visual Complexity in Computer Graphics Scenes     SPIE Human Vision and Electronic Imaging (HVEI) '08     Jan 2008, San Jose CA      Bibtex
	Milind Kulkarni, Keshav Pingali, Ganesh Ramanarayanan, Bruce Walter, Kavita Bala, Paul Chew.      Optimistic Parallelism Benefits from Data Partitioning     ASPLOS '08     Mar 2008, Seattle      Bibtex
	Ganesh Ramanarayanan, James Ferwerda, Bruce Walter, Kavita Bala.      Visual Equivalence: Towards a new standard for Image Fidelity     SIGGRAPH 2007     August 2007, San Diego CA      Project, Bibtex
	Milos Hasan, Fabio Pellacini, Kavita Bala.      Matrix Row-Column Sampling for the Many Lights Problem     SIGGRAPH 2007     August 2007, San Diego MA      Project, Bibtex
	Fabio Pellacini, Milos Hasan, Kavita Bala.      Interactive Cinematic Relighting with Global Illumination     Chapter 9, GPU Gems 3
	Milind Kulkarni, Keshav Pingali, Bruce Walter, Ganesh Ramanarayanan, Kavita Bala, Paul Chew.      Optimistic Parallelism Requires Abstractions     PLDI 2007     June 2007, San Diego MA      Bibtex
	Ganesh Ramanarayanan, Kavita Bala.      Constrained Texture Synthesis via Energy Minimization     IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Graphics 2007     pp 167-178, Jan/Feb 2007      Bibtex
	Bruce Walter, Adam Arbree, Kavita Bala, Donald Greenberg.      Multidimensional lightcuts     SIGGRAPH 2006     pp 1081--1088, August 2006, Boston MA      Project, Bibtex
	Milos Hasan, Fabio Pellacini, Kavita Bala.      Direct-to-Indirect Transfer for Cinematic Relighting     SIGGRAPH 2006     pp 1089--1097, August 2006, Boston MA      Project, Bibtex
	Edgar Velázquez-Armendáriz, Eugene Lee, Bruce Walter, Kavita Bala.      Implementing the Render Cache and the Edge-and-Point Image on Graphics Hardware     Proceedings of Graphics Interface 2006     pp 211-217, June 2006, Quebec Canada      Project, Bibtex
	Mike Donikian, Bruce Walter, Kavita Bala, Sebastian Fernandez, and Donald Greenberg.      Accurate Direct Illumination Using Iterative Adaptive Sampling     Proceedings of Transaction on Visualization and Computer Graphics 2006     pp 353--364, May/June 2006      Bibtex
	Kavita Bala, Jim Ferwerda, and Bruce Walter.      Information-Preserving Imaging for Heterogeneous Networked Displays     Workshop on Information Visualization and Interaction Techniques for Collaboration across Multiple Displays     April 2006
	Bruce Walter, Sebastian Fernandez, Adam Arbree, Kavita Bala, Mike Donikian and Donald Greenberg.      Lightcuts: A Scalable Approach to Illumination     Proceedings of SIGGRAPH 2005, Annual Conference Series     pp 1098-1107, July 2005, Los Angeles, CA      Project, Bibtex
	Bruce Walter, Sebastian Fernandez, Adam Arbree, Kavita Bala, Mike Donikian and Donald Greenberg.      Implementing Lightcuts     SIGGRAPH 2005 Technical Sketch     July 2005, Los Angeles, CA      Bibtex
	Ganesh Ramanarayanan, Kavita Bala, and Bruce Walter.      Feature-Based Textures     Proceedings of Eurographics Symposium on Rendering (EGSR) 2004,      pp 265--274, June 2004, Norkoping, Sweden     Project, Bibtex
	Kavita Bala, Bruce Walter and Donald Greenberg.       Combining Edges and Points for Interactive High-Quality Rendering      Proceedings of SIGGRAPH 2003, Annual Conference Series,      22(3): 631--640, July 2003, San Diego, CA      Bibtex
	Ryan Ismert, Kavita Bala, and Donald Greenberg.      Detail Synthesis for Image-Based Texturing     Interactive 3D Graphics (I3D),     pp 171--176, April 2003, Monterey, CA     Bibtex
	Sebastian Fernandez, Kavita Bala, Donald Greenberg.      Local Illumination Environments for Direct Lighting Acceleration     Thirteenth Eurographics Workshop on Rendering,     pp 7--14, June 2002, Pisa, Italy.     Bibtex
	Randima Fernando, Sebastian Fernandez, Kavita Bala, and Donald Greenberg.      Adaptive Shadow Maps     Proceedings of SIGGRAPH 2001, Annual Conference Series,     pp 387--390, August 2001, Los Angeles, CA     Bibtex
	Kavita Bala, Julie Dorsey, and Seth Teller.      Radiance Interpolants for Accelerated Bounded-Error Ray Tracing.     ACM Transactions on Graphics, Volume 18, Number 3.     pp 213-256. August 1999. PS(compressed 4.4 MB, uncompressed 52 MB)     Bibtex
	Kavita Bala, Julie Dorsey, and Seth Teller.      Interactive Ray-Traced Scene Editing Using Ray Segment Trees     Tenth Eurographics Workshop on Rendering,     pp 31--44, June 1999, Granada, Spain.     Bibtex
	Seth Teller, Kavita Bala, and Julie Dorsey.      Conservative Radiance Interpolants for Ray Tracing.     Seventh Eurographics Workshop on Rendering,     pp 257-268, June, 1996, Porto, Portugal.     Color Plate     Bibtex
	Krishna Bala, T. E. Stern, David Simchi-Levi and Kavita Bala.       Routing in Linear Lightwave Networks.      IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking, Volume 3, Number 4,      pp 459--469, 1995.
	Kavita Bala, Frans M. Kaashoek and William E. Weihl.       Software Prefetching and Caching for Translation Lookaside Buffers .      Proceedings of the First Symposium on Operating System Design and Implementation (OSDI),      pp 243--253, November 1994, Monterey, CA.
	Krishna Bala, T. E. Stern and Kavita Bala.       Algorithms for Routing in Linear Lightwave Networks.      Proceedings of the Tenth Annual Conference of IEEE Infocom,      1991. Miami, Florida.
	Krishna Bala, T.E. Stern and Kavita Bala.       A Minimum Interference Routing Algorithm for a Linear Lightwave Network.      Proceedings of IEEE Globecom,      1991. Phoenix, Arizona.
Technical Reports and Courses
	Milos Hasan, Fabio Pellacini, and Kavita Bala.      Real-time Hardware-accelerated Relighting with Approximate Indirect Illumination      Technical Report TR2005-1999,      Computer Science Department, July 2005
	Adam Arbree, Bruce Walter, and Kavita Bala.      Pre-processing Environment Maps for Dynamic Hardware Shadows      Technical Report TR2005-1998,      Computer Science Department, July 2005
	Kavita Bala, and Bruce Walter.      Reusing Shading for Interactive Global Illumination      Course at Game Developers Conference 2004
	Ryan Ismert, Kavita Bala, and Donald Greenberg.       Detail Synthesis for Image-Based Texturing      Longer version of I3D paper with more details      Technical Report PCG-03-1,      Program of Computer Graphics, January 2003
	Phil Dutre, Kavita Bala, and Philippe Baekert.       Advanced Global Illumination Course      Course 2 at SIGGRAPH 2002
	Kavita Bala, Bruce Walter and Donald Greenberg.       Combining Edges and Points for Interactive Anti-Aliased Rendering      Earlier version of SIGGRAPH 2003 paper      Technical Report PCG-02-3,      Program of Computer Graphics, January 2002
	Phil Dutre, Kavita Bala, and Philippe Baekert.       Advanced Global Illumination Course      Course 20 at SIGGRAPH 2001
	Sebastian Fernadez, Kavita Bala, Moreno A. Piccolotto, and Donald Greenberg.       Interactive Direct Lighting in Dynamic Scenes     Cornell University PCG Technical Report PCG-00-02,     January, 2000.
	Moreno A. Piccolotto, Sebastian Fernandez, Kavita Bala, M. Malone, and Donald Greenberg.      A System for 3D Conceptual Modeling for Architectural Design     Cornell University PCG Technical Report PCG-00-03,     January, 2000.
	Kavita Bala, Julie Dorsey, and Seth Teller       Bounded-Error Interactive Ray Tracing.      MIT Laboratory for Computer Science Technical Report 748 (MIT-TR-748), March, 1998.      Color plates: Color Plate 1, and Color Plate 2.
	Kavita Bala. Conservative Radiance Interpolants for Ray Tracing.  Proceedings of the 1996 MIT Workshop on Scalable Computing, August 1996.
	Kavita Bala. A Simulator for Linear Lightwave Networks.       Columbia University, CTR Technical Report, 1990.
Theses
	Kavita Bala     Radiance Interpolants for Interactive Scene Editing and Ray Tracing      Doctorate, EECS, Massachusetts Institute of Tehcnology (MIT)      MIT Laboratory for Computer Science Technical Report 791 (MIT-LCS-TR-791),      September, 1999.
	Master of Science, EECS, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).      Software Prefetching and Caching for Translation Lookaside Buffers .     1995.
Unpublished projects
	I have implemented a new rendering model to capture the fine lighting effects of stalactites and stalagmites. Satyan Coorg worked on creating the models of the stalactites and stalagmites.
	I captured the interference patterns formed by thin oil films/slicks on water using Renderman.

Kavita Bala's Projects Perception of Complex Scenes Rendering and modeling complex scenes is challenging. Understanding and exploiting how humans perceive complex scenes is an important area in graphics. We have worked on multiple projects in this area. Understanding how we perceive complex geometric aggregates is an open problem. We study the perception of aggregates to derive metrics for scene simplification (SIG '08) (Project). Standard image fidelity qualities are limiting and do not necessarily capture what is visually important to a graphics practitioner. Visual Equivalence (SIG '07) aims at a new standard of image fidelity that captures what is important in preserving the appearance of objects in a scene (Project). Scalable high-complexity rendering Rendering high complexity scenes including complex illumination and rendering effects such as motion blur, participating media, global illumination, and depth-of-field, is challenging. Multidimensional lightcuts (SIG '06) and lightcuts (SIG '05) present a unified, scalable rendering framework to efficiently render complex scenes with such effects. By unifying complex illumination into one framework we achieve high scalability and accurate imagery. (Multidimensional Lightcuts Project, Subsurface Lightcuts Project, Lightcuts Project). Scalable previewing for cinematic rendering Previewing still images and animations of scenes with high geometric and illumination complexity, and arbitrary shading models, is useful for applications such as cinematic lighting design. Matrix row-column sampling (SIG '07) treats rendering as the evaluation of a very large matrix of pixel-light interactions; this matrix can be efficiently approximated by evaluating a very small set of pixels, and using them to cluster lights globally, for a fast approximation of the image (Project). Tensor clustering extends this idea to render animations including deforming characters. This work extends the row-column sampling approach to tensors, and introduces a clustering metric that minimizes temporal flicker (Project). Scene Editing and Cinematic Relighting Lighting designers and modelers need interactive feedback while designing scenes. Direct-to-indirect transfer (SIG '06), is an interactive relighting engine that uses GPUs to compute indirect illumination as a designer moves lights in a scene. Efficient precomputation and rendering enable high performance, while supporting arbitrary light shaders and high complexity scenes. (Project). When a user changes the scene (but not the lighting), rapidly identifying the parts of the radiance computation that are affected by user manipulation is difficult. 5D Ray Segment Trees (EGRW '99) efficiently identify affected radiance interpolants and incrementally ray trace images. (Project). Feature-Based Graphics The human visual system is sensitive to features such as silhouettes and shadows. Edge-and-point rendering (SIG '03) identifies visually important features (edges) and combines them with sparse, expensive shading samples to achieve interactive rendering with global illumination. This approach bridges the gap between expensive, high-quality rendering and fast, interactive display. Project, GPU implementation project (GI '06) Feature-based textures (EGSR '04) are a resolution-independent representation of textures that capture visually important features. FBT Project Detail Synthesis Detail synthesis (I3D '03) adds visually plausible detail to textures created by image-based modeling. This approach identifies areas of poor detail in extracted textures and automatically creates higher resolution detail for uniformly high-quality textures. Project Constrained Minimization Synthesis (TVCG '06) casts detail synthesis and image analogies as an energy minimization problem, and uses graph cut techniques to synthesize textures while satisfying constraints. Project Direct Illumination Adaptive shadow maps (SIG '01) address the fundamental problem of shadow map aliasing by adaptively changing shadow map resolution based on viewpoint. ASM Project Local illumination environments (EGSR '02) capture the part of the environment that influences shading at each part of a scene. This approach enables rendering with complex direct illumination including hundreds of lights. LIE Project Iterative adaptive sampling (TVCG '06) efficiently renders scenes with many lights by adapting the sampling distribution of the lights in a multipass algorithm.   Radiance Interpolants Expensive shading is often smooth and can be often interpolated from sparse samples. Radiance interpolants (TOG '99) are 4D radiance samples that are quadrilinearly interpolated to rapidly approximate radiance with bounded approximation error. Radiance interpolants capture object-space, ray-space, image-space and temporal coherence in the radiance function. Radiance interpolants Project Unpublished research I have implemented a new rendering model to capture the fine lighting effects of stalactites and stalagmites. Satyan Coorg worked on creating the models of the stalactites and stalagmites. Complete List of Publications...

Kavita Bala's Bio

Kavita Bala is an Assistant Professor in the Computer Science Department and Program of Computer Graphics at Cornell University. She received her S.M. and Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and her B.Tech. from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT, Bombay). Bala specializes in computer graphics, leading research projects in scalable rendering, perceptually-based rendering, interactive global illumination, and image-based modeling and texturing. She has co-authored the graduate-level textbook "Advanced Global Illumination" (A K Peters publisher, second edition). In 2005 she co-chaired the Eurographics Symposium on Rendering (EGSR). Bala has received the NSF CAREER award, Cornell's College of Engineering James and Mary Tien Excellence in Teaching Award, and Cornell's Affinito-Stewart award.