Winter Quarter 2000

These are the courses I am taking during this quarter:
ECS 240 - Programming Languages
The closest thing to theoretical computer science / information science taught at UC Davis. Covers formal syntax and semantics, the relationship between semantics and verification, language design principles, lambda calculus and language implementation.

Together with Eric Wohlstadter and Serban Porumbescu, I wrote a Scheme interpreter as a project for this class. At this point you can only download a pre-compiled version for SGI workstations (IRIX 6.3 or better); the source code will be published after the due date. ;)

ECS 251 - Operating System Models
Surveys formal models for analyzing operating systems. Parallel processing, synchronization, performance evaluation, scheduling, memory management. The textbook is Singhal, M. and Shivaratri, N.G., Advanced Concepts in Operating Systems, McGraw-Hill Inc., 1994.
ECS 289H - Advanced Volume Visualization
Presents basic methods for rendering of volumetric data and acceleration and optimization methods. Ray casting, shear-warp factorization, splatting, volume rendering using 3D texturing hardware.

On Wednesday, 02/16/2000, I gave a lecture on Volume Rendering using 3D texture mapping hardware. These are my lecture notes.

I am a bit unhappy about the way sampling theory was treated in this class - after all, sampling theory is the basis of all that is Volume Rendering, and understanding what one does wrong is necessary to make it right some day. To this effect, I decided to crank out a little pamphlet describing what little I know about sampling theory. Click here to read Sampling Theory 101.

As a quarter project for this class, I developed a point-based volume rendering algorithm for interactive volume previewing. Though this program is only intended to generate low-quality images for easier and faster navigation of large-scale volumetric datasets, it generates pretty decent images - and fast! Check out my Volume Rendering page.

ECS 290 - Seminar in Computer Science
A weekly lecture series, featuring presentations by faculty, researchers and honored guests.
ECS 290C - Graduate Research Group Conference
This is the CIPIC group's weekly presentation meeting.
ECS 396 - Teaching Assistance Training Practice
Well, this is not actually a course, but it gives me credit for being a Teaching Assistant.