Statement of Objectives
The Computer has made Gods out of men. It gives us the power to create worlds with our imaginations. Nowhere is this power more visible than in the field of Computer Graphics. This is where I want to be.
I was first introduced to computers at the age of 12, when my school offered a course in BASIC. I was immediately infatuated by them and knew that they were going to be a large part of my life. Soon I was staying back after hours to play with the PCs in school, long after all the other kids had left. Preferring to have me home at the usual time my parents got me a computer of my own, a PC-XT. This was the beginning of a long dynasty of “Intel Inside” PCs that came to rule my life.
I can’t recall any time in the last ten years when I was not working on a project of some sort. The projects were many and varied: animating line cartoons in BASIC, rendering fractals, a GUI to simulate a piano… College (it had to be CS, of course) was a revelation. For the first time, my horizons expanded to see the enormous amount of work done by countless others. Bresenham’s algorithm gave me ideas for optimizing other algorithms like texture mapping, gouraud shading etc. The knowledge I gained during my years of under-graduation led me to write a real-time graphics demo “Illusions”. This demo includes highly optimized implementation of algorithms like flat shading, gouraud shading, texture mapping, 3D model display, etc. I developed a volume-based ray-caster to generate high quality images, which is insensitive of the scene’s complexity. I designed a game “Ikkinomu”, which won the II prize for the Enix game software contest II organized by Enix Corporation, Japan. I also developed a client/server (both in Java) to play the popular IRC game “Acromania”
To achieve high-speed ray-tracing I developed a system for performing parallel rendering using a network of workstations. The system for parallel rendering using a network of workstations did not give real-time results. That would require more fine-grained parallelism. This motivated me to investigate a parallel algorithm for real-time ray-tracing. It is titled “Parallel Discrete Ray-Tracing”. This algorithm uses a distributed data-parallel volume rendering technique for achieving real-time ray-traced rendering independent of the scene’s complexity.
I was elected secretary of our department organization, Association of Computer Engineers (ACE). In that capacity, I organized a national-level technical symposium “Interrupt ’98” and motivated my classmates to work on ambitious projects. I was a member of the organizing committee of the VLSI Design ’98 conference and worked in a team that provided Internet access to the delegates using a VSAT and microwave based network. This project involved the design and setup of a network and also administration of two Internet-connected Linux servers.
I have been awarded the TATA-IBM scholarship to attend the international conference on High Performance Computing (HiPC ’98) which was held at Madras. To keep me abreast of the latest ideas and innovations in related areas, I regularly read IEEE computer graphics and applications, IEEE transactions on visualization and computer graphics and IEEE Micro.
I have chosen Massachusetts Institute of Technology as my first step towards a career in research. I have read some of Prof. Julie Dorsey’s publications on illumination and lighting, and would love to work under her.
I plan to work on an MS leading to Ph.D. in the related areas of computer graphics and parallel processing. My research goals are to design systems for achieving photo-realistic animations in real-time.
Computer Graphics is an exciting area to work and play in. But it will always be too slow for the applications that people want. That is the tragedy, and that is the allure.