Projects
This is a (partial) list of past and present projects that I worked and work on. Some descriptions link to other pages with additional information but many don't. If you want more information on any of these subjects, then please contact me.
Computer Science at Dutch High Schools
I teach Computer Science to students from three high
schools in Amsterdam. This is within the context of a
project from its
academy to stimulate students' interest in Computer
Science. In my third year in this project I have final-year
students working on one big Informatica Project (in
Dutch - if that's not your tongue, try the Google
translation).
UvA-MTT: the UvA Multi-Touch Table
We have designed and built a multi-touch surface display which we
demonstrated at SuperComputing 2008 (SC08) in Austin, TX. Our
primary demonstration at the Dutch Research booth was an
application that allows monitoring and control of a programmable
computer network. This work was done in collaboration with the
System and Network Engineering (SNE) group.
For more information take a look at this poster on the
design and construction of the
UvA MultiTouchTable, this poster on the
Interactive Networks application we showed at
SC08.
General purpose computing on GPUs
The rate of increase in performance of modern graphics hardware
far exceeds that of CPUs. For example; the performance of NVIDIAs
GeForce 8800GTX, released at the end of 2006, is 340 GFLOP/s which
is roughly ten times as fast as the fastest CPU released by Intel
at that time. Now that graphics processing units (GPUs) have
evolved from fixed function processing pipelines to programmable
parallel SIMD (Single Instruction Multiple Data) architectures,
researchers have started to use their computational power for
other tasks than graphics. We have worked on a GPU implementation
of a direct gravitational N-body simulation for astrophysics
simulations, implemented in NVIDIA's CUDA.
Have a look at this
poster for more information.
VL-e: the Virtual Laboratory for eScience
The Virtual Laboratory for eScience (VL-e) is a Dutch project to
enhance scientific research through grid-technology.
I coordinated a subprogramme on grid applications for medical
imaging and diagnostics. This research consisted of partners from
academia and industry, including
AMC,
VUmc,
Philips Research,
Philips Medical Systems
and IBM.
For more information, visit the VL-e project homepage.
WiVR: a Window into Virtual Reality
We developed an augmented reality demonstration for the
co-located visualization of virtual objects over physical
objects. In one particular instance we showed
a handheld tablet PC that was used to inspect a CT scan of
a glass jar containing a panther cub in ethanol, lovingly
called "the dead cat demo". This work done as a
proof-of-concept demonstration for the VL-e project to show
that it is possible to create a highly interactive visual
experience using distributed computing and visualization
resources. For more information, visit the WiVR
page of have look at this
poster.
Simulated Vascular Reconstruction in a Virtual Operating Theatre
My PhD research included many of the research areas described
above into a test case to asses their viability. This environment
combines interactive visualisation of patient specific vascular
medical data with a flow simulation environment into an
interactive exploration environments that provides a virtual
operating theatre in which vascular reconstruction procedures can
be simulated.
In this environment, the lattice Boltzmann flow simulation
technique is used to simulate blood flow through human vascular
geometry obtained from patients with vascular disease. An
interactive virtual environment visualizes the results of this
blood flow simulation and allows a vascular surgeon to
interactively explore alternative treatments for the patient.
Based on simulation results, the vascular surgeon can form a
decision on which of these treatments could be best for a patient
when applied in practice.