Speaker:

Ioannis Gkioulekas, Associate Professor
Robotics Institute, Carnegie Mellon Institute

Talk Title:

A ‘ray tracer’ for physics

Date and Location:

Thursday, April 9, 2026

3–4 p.m.

BA 5166 (DGP seminar room) and online. Zoom registration link for virtual attendance.

Reception to follow

There is no registration required to attend this event in person. However, seating is limited, so arriving early is recommended.

Abstract:

Ray tracing has revolutionized science and engineering, by enabling the simulation of light at unprecedented scale and generality. Yet how we simulate light is in stark contrast with how we simulate other physical phenomena, modeled through general partial differential equations, for which methods such as finite elements have been the gold standard for decades. The reliance of these methods on grid-based discretization fundamentally limits how much we can scale or generalize physics simulation, in turn hindering progress across all areas of science and engineering. I will discuss ongoing work to change this state of affairs, by creating new methods for simulation of partial differential equations that achieve the same scale and generality as ray tracing. As with ray tracing, the key insight behind these algorithms is to elide discretization through Monte Carlo estimation. Our Monte Carlo simulation methods are embarrassingly parallelizable, scale to massive scene specifications, enable differentiability and volumetrization, and create exciting new opportunities for utilizing simulation in computational imaging.

Biography:

Ioannis Gkioulekas is an associate professor in the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. He works broadly in computer graphics and computer vision, focusing on computational imaging: the joint design of optics, electronics, and computation, to achieve unprecedented imaging capabilities. Technical keywords that often show up in his research include: interferometry, acousto-optics, single-photon imaging, lidar, speckle, physics-based rendering, differentiable rendering, volume rendering, Monte Carlo simulation. For his research he has received the NSF CAREER Award, Sloan Research Fellowship, Bodossaki Distinguished Young Scientist Award, industry awards from Sony and Google, and several best paper awards at CVPR and SIGGRAPH.