GD03, Day Three
Today is the day with all the talks I wanted to go to, and yes, today is a fruitful day in terms of things learned and things discovered.

The morning started with the two plenary talks. The first one is given by Jorg Peters on "Mid-Structures Linking Curved & Linear Geometry", which is actually about the work to create a tight polygonal (or polyhedral) bounding shape for various spline curves (or surfaces). This one, I didn't have any expectations (mostly I knew hardly anything related to this) but it was pleasant and I learned a few things from his talk.

The second, and the one I was most looking forwards to, is the one by Konrad Polthier. This talk will be a summary of recent work him and colleagues have done in the area of discrete differential geometry and related applications. The talk was as good as I have hoped, and I did manage to talk to Konrad afterwards and asked him a few work-related questions.

The morning symposium session is on surface mesh parameterizations. One application of this for the layperson is that this allows for effective texture mapping onto meshes -- but there are other uses too besides this. Anyways, I'll save the details of this session for the trip report I'll write at work, but it is safe to say I enjoyed this session the most, out of all the sessions so far. :)

By lunch time, Chris Ingram showed up and along with Steve and Ken, we went to lunch at the same cafe we went to yesterday. Today, though, the clam chowder was thin and disappointing. The barbecued pacific salmon sandwich was heavenly! Maybe tomorrow I'll go yet again. HA HA. After lunch we walked to the Pike Place Starbucks. Now, this is apparently the first store-front of Starbucks, anywhere. (There is some dispute whether this is truly the first Starbucks, ever, since rumour had it that the first Starbucks is really a trolley that was pushed around by the founder to sell coffee at bus stops and such. Who knows.) I bought a mug specially made for this store, with the traditional, R-rated, Starbucks logo, and some inscription to the effect of "This is mug from the very first Starbucks location."

We came back for the after lunch, and I went to the Mesh Generation session. This session was a bit of a hit and miss. Really, only half the talks were really applicable (I had expected a bit more) but it was fun nonetheless. The one surprisingly fun talk was the one given by Gerald Farin (yes, THE Gerald Farin, ha ha) on their work to compress triangular meshes by treating the vertices of a triangle strip as control points of a b-spline curve. The idea is very refreshing (it uses a completely different approach than other existing methods in this field.) It is work in progress, but already has promising results compared with currently best, published, results. There is one talk on improving QEM-based decimation of ultra-dense triangle meshes, and finally a PDE and distance field based mesh modelling scheme. I went to talk to the speaker of the latter talk, and eventually requested that he send me a copy of his dissertation when he has time.

I kinda sat around until banquet time, during which I met with a young fella by the name of Hassan Ugail, a researcher in the UK specializing in the use of PDE-surface modelling. I have to admit that I knew nothing of this field before, yet his overview of the field is terribly exciting. I think I'll look into it for fun, at least. Oh. How was the food at the banquet? Certainly not worth the money I paid for it. However, just part of the experience at these small conferences I think -- and to think that one gets to be in attendence of such collection of illuminaries in the field. :) Maybe it's worth the $50 bucks or whatever I paid. :)