05/09/2023

IMPA master's student completes MIT summer program.

Daniel Perazzo, a master's student at Visgraf (IMPA's Computer Graphics Laboratory), was one of 32 graduate students from various countries selected to participate in the Summer Geometry Initiative (SGI) program, run by MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology). The project, which has been running since 2021, offers students an immersion in the field of geometry processing and involves areas of scientific computing, topology, optimization, statistics, scientific computing, among others.

This year's edition had four Brazilian students – among them, Perazzo, who considered the experience very enriching. “The idea of the program is to offer a week of instruction in geometric processing with the best professors from academia and industry. In the following five weeks, we worked on projects that were completely different from each other. I was able to use a lot of what I had already learned at Visgraf, a pioneering laboratory in this area, which prepared me very well for this project.”

The program lasted six weeks in an online format and took place in July and August. The first five days consisted of classes on the practice of geometry processing. Afterwards, the students were divided into teams led by professors and scientists who took turns working on several different projects, with Perazzo participating in five of them: solving partial differential equations using neural networks, 3D reconstruction of a seabed, polygon triangulation, reinforcement learning using quasimetrics, and finally, the creation of a machine learning competition.

The summer program also featured several lectures by professors from different countries, including two Brazilians: Fernando Goés and Adriana Schulz. Goés is a former collaborator of Visgraf and current researcher at Pixar, the American animation studio. This year, he was awarded the SciTech Oscar for developing a system for simulating the dynamics of elastic objects used in several of the studio's productions. Adriana, who holds a master's degree from IMPA, is a professor at the University of Washington and a member of the institution's Computer Graphics Group.

“Another important point is that both lecturers for the course were Brazilian and former Visgraf students. It’s really cool to see that former students from here are now teaching there. Brazil has become one of the most represented countries in this program, showing the strength of the community,” concluded the student.

Perazzo holds a degree in computer engineering from UFPE (Federal University of Pernambuco). In 2022, his undergraduate thesis, “DirectVoxGo++: Fast Neural Radiance Fields for Object Reconstruction,” received an award at SIBGRAPI (Conference on Graphics, Patterns and Images), an international conference held annually by the Special Interest Group in Computer Graphics and Image Processing (CEGRAPI) of the Brazilian Computer Society (SBC). This work was carried out in partnership with IMPA.

“I think this work was, by far, one of the things that helped me the most to get into the program. It was a partnership between the Voxar Labs team, UFPE, and here. I hope other Brazilians apply for future editions of the program, including IMPA students,” said the master's student.