[VPM] LAST MINUTE ANNOUNCE: Sat, Nov 4th is November RCSS meeting!

[Darren Duncan]

It appears that those of you not on the reccompsci at googlegroups.com 
list may not yet have heard of this, since the announement may not 
have been forwarded yet.  So if you actually are interested, sorry 
for the last minute notice.

--------------

Date: Mon, 23 Oct 2006 01:02:10 -0700
From: "Peter van Hardenberg" <pvh at pvh.ca>
To: reccompsci at googlegroups.com
Subject: [reccompsci] November RCSS meeting!
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Sirs and Madams,

the hour approaches once again. The RCSS meeting for November will be held on

**SATURDAY**, November 4th at 7:00PM
UVic ECS 660 (top floor conference room)

This shocking deviation from the Tuesday norm will allow our guest 
speaker Peter Andrews to attend from Vancouver where he toils 
endlessly for Blue Castle Games. The schedule stands as follows 
(subject to amendments if I've forgotten anyone or mucked up the 
descriptions):

The Schedule
----

  * Fresh Research: Raytracing developments -- ray bundles and ray 
caching. With modern graphics cards capable of pushing millions of 
polygons per second, it is becoming increasingly common that scenes 
are composed of sub-pixel polys. Ray-tracing algorithms scale better 
with scene complexity than polygon-based algorithms. Some pundits are 
predicting the future will be rendered one pixel at a time. (Ryan 
Nordman)

* FYI: Roll Your Own Relational Database. Many applications can 
benefit from the principles of relational databases, even when a 
fullblown RDBMS such as Oracle would be inappropriate. In part of a 
two talk series partnered with the Victoria Perl Mongers, Darren 
Duncan will give an introduction to the theory behind a relational 
database. Part two (at this month's <http://Victoria.pm>Victoria.pm) 
will focus on implementation, so when your apetite is whetted by part 
one, the followup will satisfy.

* Guest Speaker: Frustrum Culling of Axis Aligned Bounding Boxes. 
Efficient scene rendering is often more about what you throw away 
than what you keep. In an industry where 16.5ms is all you get (and 
you have to share it with those hopeless AI guys) every cycle counts. 
Peter Andrews, former President of the UVic Games Club visits from 
Blue Castle Games, and has also offered to share his experience with 
finding employment in the entertainment software industry.

What's coming up?
----
December's guest speaker will be UVic's own Dr. George Tzanetakis. 
George is a pioneer in the field of Music Information Retrieval, or 
computer listening. His research includes algorithms which can 
categorize music into genres, or recognize different recordings of 
the same song.

January's guest speaker will be Dr. Ulrike Stege. Ulrike's research 
is in the field of Parameterized Complexity, and she will provide an 
introduction to the field by explaining its application to solving 
Minesweeper algorithmically. Unfortunately, she has not promised a 
solution to the problem of what you will do with all the time you 
have left over as a result.

<snip>

See you all at the meeting on SATURDAY,

-pvh

--
Peter van Hardenberg
Victoria, BC, Canada