Ever since mid-1980's, physics-based modeling and simulation has been ubiquitous in visual computing, virtual reality, 3D interactive graphics, geometric modeling, processing, and analysis, and digital engineering and entertainment with a large variety of applications. In technical essence, physics-based models and their dynamic behaviors are governed by physical laws in the form of Partial Differential Equations (PDEs) built upon the variational, energy-optimization modeling framework. In the first half of this presentation, I will overview the latest development of deformable models and their applications in shape modeling, simulation, and synthesis, with applications in computer animation, virtual reality, digital media, medical imaging, etc. Since late 1990's, we have witnessed a paradigm shift in visual computing from the model-driven methodology to new data-driven methods and computational techniques. Strongly inspired by this new paradigm and its latest development, I will advocate a new physics-based approach to shape analysis, data mining, and machine learning in the second half of this presentation. Our current research focuses are to apply PDEs with initial or boundary value conditions to shape analysis, visual information processing, and medical imaging. Specific application areas include: virtual surgery simulation, shape feature extraction and classification, data segmentation and clustering, non-rigid registration for volumetric medical data analysis, geometry information processing, etc. After presenting thorough theoretical results and foundations, I will showcase a large variety of applications in computer science and engineering, and briefly discuss future research and development directions.

          Prof. Hong Qin received the BS and MS degrees in computer science from Peking University, China, and the PhD degree in computer science from the University of Toronto (UofT), in 1995. He is a full professor of computer science in the Department of Computer Science, State University of New York, Stony Brook University, Stony Brook. During his years with the University of Toronto, he received UofT open doctoral fellowship. He was also a recipient of NSF CAREER Award from the US National Science Foundation, Honda Initiation Award, and Alfred P. Sloan research fellow by the Sloan Foundation. Currently, he serves as an associate editor of The Visual Computer, the Graphical Models, and the Journal of Computer Science and Technology. His research interests include geometric and solid modeling, graphics, physics-based modeling and simulation, computer aided geometric design, human computer interaction, visualization, and scientific computing. Detailed information about him can be found from his web site: http://www.cs.sunysb.edu/~qin. He is a senior member of the IEEE and the IEEE Computer Society.