Minitutorials
It has been a good tradition of the SIAM conference series on Geometric Design to organize a minitutorial on a topic of current interest. Two such minitutorials will be held at the 10th conference. They will take place at the same location on Sunday, November 4, 2007, immediately preceding the main scientific program of the conference. ALL PARTICIPANTS OF THE CONFERENCE ARE INVITED TO ATTEND FREE OF CHARGE.

The first minitutorial is scheduled during the period 10am-12noon, to be given by Bernard Mourrain, while the second will take place during the slot 2-5pm and will be given by Chris Hoffmann and Meera Sitharam. Below are descriptions of both minitutorials.
  • The ABC of Geometric Constraint Solving
    Organizers: Christoph M. Hoffmann, Purdue University & Meera Sitharam, University of Florida

    The tutorial will present a birds-eye view of geometric constraint solving, motivated by applications in engineering and in molecular biology. We will discuss elementary methods that anyone can implement and advanced questions that are at this time in the research domain. The following topics will be explored:

    A) Applications in engineering and molecular biology; underlying equational problems; sequential vs. simultaneous problems.

    B) Basic techniques for bottom-up triangle decomposition; extensions to higher dimensions and to higher-order subproblems; solution space issues.

    C) Advanced topics: intrinsic complexity, DR plans, special techniques.

    At the end, participants will be ready to implement a simple constraint solver engine and have enough background to fast-track into the literature on the subject.

  • Subdivision Methods for the Solution of Non-linear Equations or How to Cut a Long Story Short.
    Organizer: Bernard Mourrain, INRIA, France

    Many operations in shape processing reduce to the resolution of non-linear equations. Among numerous methods which exists for solving such equations, the subdivision approach appears to be practically efficient for solving problems which occur in geometric modeling problems.

    The objectives of this tutorial, is to give a comprehensive overview of such methods based on divide-and-conquer schemes to localize the (real) solutions of polynomial equations. We will briefly describe the landscape of polynomial solvers and the family of subdivision solvers from this perspective.

    After this introduction, we will consider solvers of univariate equations, detail their subdivision strategies and the properties they exploit to isolate efficiently the real solutions. This tour will bring us to Descartes rule of sign, De Casteljau algorithm, Continued fraction expansion, and numerical approximation issues.

    The second part will be devoted to multivariate equations. Techniques which reduce to solving univariate problems will be explained and analysed. Preconditioning operations and certification criteria will be detailed and illustration on practical problems will be given.

    Finally, we will consider extensions of this approach to problems where solution sets are curves or surfaces. We will see how their topology can be computed from the application of such subdivision techniques, including the treatement of singular points.

    These developments will be illustrated by examples, and experimentation with a computer algebra system and a geometric modeler software. We plan to provide a support in order to encourage the audience to do the experimentation itself.

Last Updated: March 14, 2007
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