Left: Happy crew with Stoca and Mr. Wei.
Middle: Excited Ebbe.
Right: Jazz configuring the video server.

Left: Divers installing the cameras
Middle: Proof (screenshot) of a successful implementation. (View Live!)
Right: Running live streaming on IMAX 4k projector in National Museum of Natural Science, TaiZhong 2008-03-08.

So… what did you do at work today??

Check out the last page on (the article is in Swedish):

http://www.metro.se/se/article/2008/02/26/14/4215-48/index.xml

Cheers,

Ebbe

just found this on google. So stupid (and a bit funny)…
http://www.chineseworld.com/wj-sf-news.php?nt_seq_id=1625247
(Non-Chinese readers might want to translate the article using babelfish (choose Chinese trad. to English)).
I should probably mention that I met the writer of the article (Mr. Wang) in San Francisco right after coming from Reno. He said that he was a photographer from some Chinese newspaper.. He said something about writing a story about the oil pollution in the bay. But he never mentioned that he was writing a story about me….

And god-damnit, i’m Swedish, not Swiss! Can anyone get that right??
Cheers!

A while ago our research poster about data management for ecological research was accepted for SC07. SC is the largest Supercomputing Conference in the world and it offers 6 days of high performance computing, networking, storage, visualization and analysis. While this may be a big turn-off for most people it couldn’t possibly be a better place to show off my research within Grid computing. And aside from being a great work achievement, it also came with a free trip to Reno in the US.

While in Reno I will, except from attending the technical conference, spend my dollars in a few of the many casinos as well as attend a reception in The National Bowling Stadium. This is where the shot the final scenes from the excellent movie Kingpin from 1996!

If you happen to be in Reno Tuesday the 13th of November, make sure to come down to the Ballroom lobby between 5 and 7.30pm for a little discussion and a free drink ticket. If you are not that lucky, then you can at least have a look at the winning poster for SC07 here below

Abstract
communication and administrative challenges. To that end, an open-source RBNB DataTurbine provides an excelle The management of real-time streaming data in largescale collaborative applications presents major processing,nt basis for developing robust streaming data middleware. The current RBNB DataTurbine streaming data middleware system satisfies a core set of critical infrastructure requirements including reliable data transport, the promotion of sensors and sensor streams to first-class objects, a framework for the integration of heterogeneous instruments, and a comprehensive suite of services for data management, routing, synchronization, monitoring, and visualization. As a part of PRAGMA telescience group, in collaboration with the National Center for High-Performance Computing (NCHC) Taiwan, researchers at the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) deployed RBNB DataTurbine-based system to acquire data from underwater cameras (in the ocean) at Kenting. More specifically, we describe a system that integrates sensors (underwater video cameras) with computing and storage Grids to create a complete fabric for conducting e-Science. The system is currently used for observation by marine research scientists at the Research Center for Biodiversity, Academia Sinica in Taiwan. The described system increased performance and availability of the captured videos and we are, so far, pleased with its results.

Read the entire article here

Abstract:

This thesis addresses the problem of constructing virtual representations of surfaces only known as clouds of unstructured points in space. This problem is related to many areas including computer graphics, image processing, computer vision, reverse engineering and geometry studies. Data sets can be acquired from a wide range of sources including Computer Tomography (CT), Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI), medical cryosections, laser range scanners, seismic surveys or mathematical models. This thesis will furthermost focus on medical samples acquired through cryosections of bodies.
In this thesis report various computational geometry approaches of surface reconstruction are evaluated in terms of adequateness for scientific uses. Two methods called “γ-regular shapes” and “the Power Crust” are implemented and evaluated. The contribution of this work is the proposal of a new hybrid method of surface reconstruction in three dimensions. The underlying thought of the hybrid solution is to utilize the inverse medial axis transformation, defined by the Power Crust, to recover holes that may appear in the three dimensional γ-regular shapes.

Screenshots:

Left: 3d Point Cloud. Right: Reconstructed Surface. The data set describes the intestines of a mouse and has been acquired through cryosections (in which the frozen mouse has been sliced in extremely thin slices which later has been scanned).

Reconstruction of human body parts.

Left: Mouse. Right: Brain of a fruitfly

(I feel compelled to spell out that no animals/humans were harmed during my research.)

My thesis is available for download here.

It was here my neighbor James was able to pick up a really cheap Super Nintendo console. This is a real hardcore gaming machine, Super Mario World was conquered in just a few days and the hot *new* game is Street Fighter Turbo. We also have a boring role playing game in Japanese…

My favorite aspect of the market is however all the fruits and vegetables that are offered at really cheap prices. Last week I spent about 75sek and I got myself about 10 capsicum (red, yellow and green), two bags of fresh basil and parsley, 5 star fruits, a big bag of carrots, a few egg plants, fresh ginger, lettuce. Much more than I can eat in a week.

And I finally found the “chicken machine” that I read about it a few years ago. It is actually a quite cruel device. The process starts when someone points at the alive, screaming and caged chicken they fancy for dinner. Then the unlucky chicken is put inside a big steaming box. After being boiled for about 5 minutes the wet and dead chicken is moved into spinning cylinder. The cylinder is connected to a pipe from which the bird’s feathers is coming out. A while later a featherless chicken is sold to the customer. Its a bit overwhelming I guess, but can you ever get a chicken fresher than that?

Well, tomorrow its Sunday. Time to go again!

But when momi, dadi and sis are located on the other side of the world I am lucky to have a Taipei family as well. This year I will celebrate Christmas together with Patricia, James and Sara.
I have been looking forward to have pickled herring on the table but unfortunately IKEA were out of stock. Instead we got ourselves a “pepparkakshus” (gingerbread house) which we happily took home, put together and decorated. We even put a little snow man next to the house, very cute. What we did not think about (and probably neither did the IKEA founder Ingvar Kamprad) was that gingerbread houses are somewhat sensitive to humidity. So, within 24 hours our nice little gingerbread house gave in and collapsed.

But instead of being sad about the ginger bread house we are happy about our nice little Christmas tree which looks very pretty and will probably never give in since its all made of plastic.

The Christmas menu this year is smorgasbord styled and Pana-Swed-American inspired, and it will be a feast. It includes:

Cold cuts: Gravlax (Marinated salmon), Gubbrora (”Old-man-mix”), Xmas cod-roe eggs

Main courses: Carrot’n'cabbage salad, Panamanian Christmas ham, Swedish meatballs, varmkorv (sausage), salami, Potatoe salad.

Desserts: Tiramisu, “James surprise”

Drinks: Mimosas, Bubble bobble
Merry Christmas!

Additional xmas pictures can be found here.

(To Nathan: too bad you are not here, we miss feeding you, and btw, your room is still prepared for your return )

To help set the mood the Swedish trade council in Taipei arranged a Lucia party earlier this week offering swedish glogg, Christmas ham, Lucia buns and to top it off a beautiful Lucia procession singing all traditional swedish Lucia songs you could ever wish for. Too bad I did not to bring my camera, it was very nice and came with plenty of Kodak moments. I also received a package from home this week (can’t wait to open it), Im ready for Christmas.

The event was a nice break from my thesis that currently takes most of my time as I am trying to conclude my research. After a lot of hard work the research turned out quite good and I feel good about what I’ve accomplished. Too bad it is over very soon, I have only about one week left on the implementation which. After that I have to finish the written report and voila, Im ready to graduate

After a swim in the river it was time for BBQ; pork, beef, a great deal of clams, some green stuff, sausage, etc. Very nice. As usual the feast lasted for hours with a few Taiwan beer and good old mr McCallan to round-off the evening.
Kudos to James and Sara for this event!

Check out some Wulai pictures.

The project is carried out at NCHC in Hsinchu, Taiwan. NCHC stands for National Center of High-Performace Computing and is a Research and Development center that conducts reseach withing various computation-related areas. It’s a really cool place; the basement is home to some really nice supercomputers and in the visualization lab one can like to play around with 3D polaroid glasses and a quite big Tiled Display Wall, driven by 24 projectors and a cluster of 13 servers .
My topic is related to the display wall as I am working within surface reconstruction. Basically my goal is to find and implement a method that enables reconstruction of 3D models from medical data sets. The application will be used to create models of fly brains, human bodies, cell structures etc. And even though the progress is quite slow, I expect that the result will be quite satisfying, in either case its been a great time conducting this research..

This is a project that I worked on in a course called Modelling and Animation where I have developed a raycasting system to visualize Levelsets. A levelset is matematical way of describing a volume in a way to make it possible to visulize whatever is encaptured inside the volume. This can be thought of as a jar that contain either physical objects or densities like fluids or gases. The levelset was orginally designed to describe moving fronts, like propagating waves or pressure changes in the air and the levelset paradigm is very cool since it seemlessly allow “objects” to merge and grow together, being totally unsensitive to topological changes etc.

The system utilizes a cubical grid in which each cube corner (or vertex) is associated with a value. In terms of “real objects” (with a defined surface) this value is calculated with a signed distance function and will express the distance from the vertex to the closest point on the surface of the object. That the values are signed allows us to define vertices as eather inside (negative value) or outside (positive value). Given this we can extract the surface by visiting all cubes that contain both verticies inside and outside the object, and interpolate between the values at the corners.

But what about if we want to visualize something that lacks a well defined surface such as a gas or an object with many layers (think about an x-ray picture)? This is when the raycasting system becomes very interesting. Instead of extracting a surface we now cast rays from our virtual camera into the volume and sample the density values along the ray. Despite being a computational expensive process this method can produce very cool results when precise transfer functions (translatation of sampling density to color) are used.

To demonstrate the above I also implemented a smoke solver for 3D. This was however more of an head ache than I expected since the math involved is quite comlex and one has to take into consideration advection (Navier-Stokes), diffusion, boundary conditions etc etc.. But even thought the final product of this smoke solver needs some work it definately shows some neat smoke-like behaviours.

For more information please look here moa_ebbst916.pdf (contains features from the labs and project in the course plus some more pictures :> )

To enable real-time rendering most operations are carried out directly at the graphics hardware. This is done by uploading image data (as textures) and usage instructions (shaders) to the GPU to make use of its parallel capacities.

Enough said, its a quite exiting project as it really takes computer graphics to its
extreme. For more info please read gpu_hdr_lighting.pdf.

Medical Visualization

GPU-based volume rendering using ray casting

Segmentation methods and large data set optimization

Brain activity visualization

Haptic simulations

Information Visualization

GPGPU: General Purpose Computation using Graphics Hardware

Lithanian #4/2005, September 2005

This is article about Taiwan that I wrote togehter with Anders Frick who i met in Taiwan. Anders graduated from the same program as I’m currently on (MSc in Media Technologies and Engineering) recently and came to Taiwan on a IMBA scholarship. Because of our mutual background we wrote this article for Lithanien which is the monthly magazine of the students at Linköping University. This article is also in swedish.

The magazine where the article is published is available here (7.91 MB).

During my time in school I’ve produced one or two things that I would like to share with my visitors. These are presented in my portfolio, please check it out!

The project was carried out during my spring semester at NTHU in Taiwan, it’s written in C/C++ and comes with a graphical user interface which allows users to play around with the the technology without having to dig deep into the math behinds it (although it ought to be be very hard to understand the algortihm without any research).