Hello, we are looking for someone to share the master room in our townhouse (4 bedrooms and 3.5 bathroom) with another UMBC student. The house is located on the Arbutus shuttle route for UMBC, very close to Giant, Mars I-695, 35 bus route. Tentative move in date is immediate/flexible/1st of September. The house is shared with four other UMBC students. We are all very easy going. We wouldn't mind parties with a heads up (We have a few once in a while). We would prefer someone who cleans after themselves. Rent is $325 plus shared utilities (split among everyone equally). And a deposit of $325. Pet friendly and open parking available. Pics available on request. Put subject as "roommate", so that it does not go to my spam folder.

Please contact me for further details or queries. gajra1@umbc.edu

On August 25, 2015, the UMBC Preschool will be having its grand re-opening and ribbon cutting ceremony! There will be a short program planned with remarks from our President, Freeman A. Hrabowski and the President and CEO of Y of Central Maryland, John Hoey, student and family testimonials, student art exhibit, and opportunities for tours and registration. Currently, at the UMBC Preschool, there are still several part-time openings for the center:

• Young Twos: 10 full time children, 4 part time children. This room is currently full and has a wait list.

• Older Twos: 10 full time children, 4 part time children. This room is currently full and has a wait list.

• Threes (must be 3 before 9/1): 16 full time children, 5 part time children. This room has 3 Tuesday/Thursday spots available. 

• Fours (must be 4 before 9/1): 13 full time children, 8 part time children. This room has 5 Tuesday/Thursday spots available.

Please come to the event to celebrate the grand re-opening! Light refreshments will be served.

Computer Science and Electrical Engineering
University of Maryland, Baltimore County

Ph.D. Dissertation Defense

The Modeling Equation: Solving the Physically-Based
Modeling and Animation Problem with a Unified Solution

Yu Wang

12:00pm Friday, 28 August 2015, ITE 352

Physically-based modeling research in computer graphics is based largely on derivation or close approximation from physics laws defining the material behaviors. From rigid object dynamics, to various kinds of deformable objects, such as elastic, plastic, and viscous fluid flow, to their interaction, almost every natural phenomena can find a rich history in computer graphics research. Due to the nonlinear nature of almost all real world dynamics, the mathematical definition of their behavior is rarely linear. As a result, solving for the dynamics of these phenomena involves non-linear numerical solvers, which sometimes introduces numerical instability, such as volume gain or loss, slow convergence.

The contribution of this project is a unified particle-based model that implements an extended SPH solver for modeling fluid motion, integrated with rigid body deformation using shape matching. The model handles phase changes between solid and liquid, including melting and solidification, where material rigidity is treated as a function of time and particle distance to the object surface, and solid fluid coupling, where rigid body motion causes secondary fluid flow motion. Due to the stability of the fluid-rigid interplay solver, we can introduce artistic control to the framework, such as rigging, where object motion is predefined by either artistic control, or procedurally generated dynamics path. Interaction with the fluid can be indirectly achieved by rigging the rigid particles which implicitly handles rigid-fluid coupling. We used marching cubes to extract the surfaces of the objects, and applied the PN-triangles to replace the planar silhouettes with cubic approximations. We provide discussion on evaluation metrics for physically-based modeling algorithms. In addition, GPU solutions are designed for physics solvers, isosurface extraction and smoothing.

Committee: Drs. Marc Olano (CSEE; Advisor, Chair), Penny Rheingans (CSEE), Jian Chen (CSEE), Matthias Gobbert (Math), Lynn Sparling (Physics)