by Adam Bargteil, Assistant Professor, Computer Science and Electrical Engineering
University of Maryland, Baltimore County

With 25 years of hindsight, “Jurassic Park” marks a pivotal point in the history of visual effects in film. It came 11 years after 1982’s “Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan” debuted computer-generated imagery for a visual effect with a particle system developed by George Lucas’s Industrial Light and Magic to animate a demonstration of a life-creating technology called Genesis. And “Tron,” also in 1982, included 15 minutes of fully computer-generated imagery, including the notable light cycle race sequence.

Yet “Jurassic Park” stands out historically because it was the first time computer-generated graphics, and even characters, shared the screen with human actors, drawing the audience into the illusion that the dinosaurs’ world was real. Even back then, upon seeing the initial digital test shots, George Lucas was stunned: He’s often quoted as saying “it was like one of those moments in history, like the invention of the light bulb or the first telephone call … A major gap had been crossed and things were never going to be the same.”

Since then, computer graphics researchers have been working to constantly improve the realism of visual effects and have achieved great success, scholarly, commercial and artistic. Today, nearly every film contains computer-generated imagery: Explosions, tsunamis and even the wholesale destruction of cities are simulated, virtual characters replace human actors and detailed 3D models and green-screen backgrounds have replaced traditional sets.

Years of progress

I have been researching computer animation for nearly two decades and witnessed the transition from practical to virtual effects; it didn’t happen overnight. In 1993, the film industry didn’t really trust computer graphics. For decades, filmmakers had relied on physical models, stop motion and practical special effects, many of them provided by ILM, which was founded to create the effects in the original “Star Wars” trilogy and, notably, provided effects for the “Indiana Jones” movie series. When he made “Jurassic Park,” therefore, director Steven Spielberg approached computer-generated sequences with caution.

By some counts, computer-generated dinosaurs were on screen for only six minutes of the two-hour movie. They were supplemented with physical models and animatronics. This juxtaposition of computer-generated and real-world imagery gave audiences the illusion of realism because the computer-generated images were on screen along with real footage.

The 3D animated movies that followed in the late 1990s – like “Toy Story” series and “Antz” – were stylized, cartoonish films limited even by the era’s best computing power, lighting models, and geometric modeling and animation packages.

The bar for realism is much higher when computer-generated images are mixed with live-action footage: Audiences and critics complained that mapping an actor’s face onto a younger virtual body didn’t work well in 2010’s “Tron: Legacy.” (Even the director admitted the effect wasn’t perfect.) In fact, small infidelities can be especially jarring when they look quite close but just a little bit off.

Early successes of computer special effects – such as “Starship Troopers,” “Armageddon” and “Pearl Harbor” – focused on adding events like explosions and other large-scale destruction. Those can be less true to real life because most of the audience hasn’t experienced similar events in person. Over the years, though, computer graphics researchers and practitioners tackled cloth, water, crowds, hair and faces.

Learning to use the innovations

There were important practical advances as well. Consider the evolution of performance capture for virtual characters. In the early days, live actors would have to imagine their interactions with computer-generated characters. The people playing the computer-generated characters would stand nearby, describing their actions out loud, as the human actors pretended to see it happening. Then the virtual-characters’ actors would record their performance in a motion capture lab, supplying data to 3D animators, who would refine the performance and render it to be incorporated in the scene.

The process was painstaking and especially difficult for the live-action actors, who couldn’t interact with the virtual characters during filming. Now, more advanced performance capture systems allow virtual characters to be interactive on the set, even on locations, and provide much richer data to the animators.

With all this technological ability, directors have to make big choices. Michael Bay is famous – among fans and critics – for extensive use of computer-generated special effects. True masters remember Spielberg’s lesson and skillfully combine the virtual and real worlds. In the “Lord of the Rings” movies, for example, it would have been easy to use computer graphics techniques to make the hobbit characters seem smaller than their human counterparts. Instead director Peter Jackson used carefully chosen camera locations and staging to achieve this effect. Similarly, the barrel escape scene from “The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug” combined footage from real river rapids with computer-generated liquids.

More recently, makeup and computer magic were combined to create a merman lead actor in much-lauded “The Shape of Water.” Looking toward the future, as synthetic images and video become ever more realistic and easy to produce, people will need to be on guard that those techniques can be used not just for entertainment but to mislead and misinform the public.

Adam Bargteil, Professor of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering, University of Maryland, Baltimore County

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

Header image: Computer-generated dinosaurs walk the Earth. Universal Pictures Studios

UMBC closed out the track and field season strong as two Retrievers competed at the highest collegiate level last week, traveling to Eugene, Oregon, for the NCAA Division I Men’s and Women’s Track and Field Championships.

Freshman Kelechi Nwanaga, financial economics, qualified for javelin finals with a throw of 51.18 meters, landing in sixth place. In the finals, Nwanaga threw an impressive 55.02 meters, setting her personal best and rebreaking the UMBC record.

Nwanaga finished in fourth place overall, earning First Team All-America Honors, the sixth track and field athlete to do so in UMBC history. She originally set the school record and the America East record at the America East Outdoor Championships in May.

“It was a good experience with it being my first time in the championship competition,” said Nwanaga. “My goal was to finish in the top five, and finishing fourth was a good feeling.”

Also competing in the javelin, Tony White ‘18, mechanical engineering, came in at 16th after throwing 65.71 meters. “It was a surreal experience,” he shared. “Being able to compete against elite athletes was amazing. The competition level at the NCAA Championships is on a level unlike anything else.”

In early May, White won gold at the America East Championships and was named to Second Team All-American by the United States Track and Field/Cross Country Coaches Association.

“It was a privilege to coach these two this year,” said  Peter Koumlelis, track and field throws coach. “We were one of eight Division I schools to have athletes in both the men’s and women’s javelin competitions at the NCAA Championships. They worked so hard to achieve all that they have this year.”

For more UMBC track and field news, see UMBC Athletics.

Banner image: Freshman Kelechi Nwanaga after winning fourth at NCAA Track and Field Championships; photo by Gail Burton.

Scientists probably found it years ago – but they don’t know it yet

Eileen Meyer, University of Maryland, Baltimore County

Earlier this year, astronomers stumbled upon a fascinating finding: Thousands of black holes likely exist near the center of our galaxy.

The X-ray images that enabled this discovery weren’t from some state-of-the-art new telescope. Nor were they even recently taken – some of the data was collected nearly 20 years ago.

No, the researchers discovered the black holes by digging through old, long-archived data.

Discoveries like this will only become more common, as the era of “big data” changes how science is done. Astronomers are gathering an exponentially greater amount of data every day – so much that it will take years to uncover all the hidden signals buried in the archives.

The evolution of astronomy

Sixty years ago, the typical astronomer worked largely alone or in a small team. They likely had access to a respectably large ground-based optical telescope at their home institution.

Their observations were largely confined to optical wavelengths – more or less what the eye can see. That meant they missed signals from a host of astrophysical sources, which can emit non-visible radiation from very low-frequency radio all the way up to high-energy gamma rays. For the most part, if you wanted to do astronomy, you had to be an academic or eccentric rich person with access to a good telescope.

Old data was stored in the form of photographic plates or published catalogs. But accessing archives from other observatories could be difficult – and it was virtually impossible for amateur astronomers.

Today, there are observatories that cover the entire electromagnetic spectrum. No longer operated by single institutions, these state-of-the-art observatories are usually launched by space agencies and are often joint efforts involving many countries.

With the coming of the digital age, almost all data are publicly available shortly after they are obtained. This makes astronomy very democratic – anyone who wants to can reanalyze almost any data set that makes the news. (You too can look at the Chandra data that led to the discovery of thousands of black holes!)

These observatories generate a staggering amount of data. For example, the Hubble Space Telescope, operating since 1990, has made over 1.3 million observations and transmits around 20 GB of raw data every week, which is impressive for a telescope first designed in the 1970s. The Atacama Large Millimeter Array in Chile now anticipates adding 2 TB of data to its archives every day.

Data firehose

The archives of astronomical data are already impressively large. But things are about to explode.

Each generation of observatories are usually at least 10 times more sensitive than the previous, either because of improved technology or because the mission is simply larger. Depending on how long a new mission runs, it can detect hundreds of times more astronomical sources than previous missions at that wavelength.

For example, compare the early EGRET gamma ray observatory, which flew in the 1990s, to NASA’s flagship mission Fermi, which turns 10 this year. EGRET detected only about 190 gamma ray sources in the sky. Fermi has seen over 5,000.

The Large Synoptic Survey Telescope, an optical telescope currently under construction in Chile, will image the entire sky every few nights. It will be so sensitive that it will generate 10 million alerts per night on new or transient sources, leading to a catalog of over 15 petabytes after 10 years.

The Square Kilometre Array, when completed in 2020, will be the most sensitive telescope in the world, capable of detecting airport radar stations of alien civilizations up to 50 light-years away. In just one year of activity, it will generate more data than the entire internet.

These ambitious projects will test scientists’ ability to handle data. Images will need to be automatically processed – meaning that the data will need to be reduced down to a manageable size or transformed into a finished product. The new observatories are pushing the envelope of computational power, requiring facilities capable of processing hundreds of terabytes per day.

The resulting archives – all publicly searchable – will contain 1 million times more information that what can be stored on your typical 1 TB backup disk.

Unlocking new science

The data deluge will make astronomy become a more collaborative and open science than ever before. Thanks to internet archives, robust learning communities and new outreach initiatives, citizens can now participate in science. For example, with the computer program Einstein@Home, anyone can use their computer’s idle time to help search for rapidly-rotating neutron stars.

It’s an exciting time for scientists, too. Astronomers like myself often study physical phenomena on timescales so wildly beyond the typical human lifetime that watching them in real-time just isn’t going to happen. Events like a typical galaxy merger – which is exactly what it sounds like – can take hundreds of millions of years. All we can capture is a snapshot, like a single still frame from a video of a car accident.

However, there are some phenomena that occur on shorter timescales, taking just a few decades, years or even seconds. That’s how scientists discovered those thousands of black holes in the new study. It’s also how they recently realized that the X-ray emission from the center of a nearby dwarf galaxy has been fading since first detected in the 1990s. These new discoveries suggest that more will be found in archival data spanning decades.

In my own work, I use Hubble archives to make movies of “jets,” high-speed plasma ejected in beams from black holes. I used over 400 raw images spanning 13 years to make a movie of the jet in nearby galaxy M87. That movie showed, for the first time, the twisting motions of the plasma, suggesting that the jet has a helical structure.

This kind of work was only possible because other observers, for other purposes, just happened to capture images of the source I was interested in, back when I was in kindergarten. As astronomical images become larger, higher resolution and ever more sensitive, this kind of research will become the norm.

This article has been updated to correct what Einstein@Home searches for.

Eileen Meyer, Assistant Professor of Physics, University of Maryland, Baltimore County

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

Header image: An artist’s illustration of a black hole “eating” a star. NASA/JPL-Caltech

“Humans have emerged as a force of nature on this planet,” UMBC’s Erle Ellis says, as he begins to explain his work. Ellis, a professor of geography and environmental systems is one of the world’s leading thinkers on the Anthropocene, a new word scientists are using to describe Earth’s current geological epoch, defined by human transformation of the planet. 

“We are changing Earth’s climate faster than at any time since the fall of the dinosaurs,” says Ellis. For scientists, he notes, “What’s controversial…is when did this begin? […] When did humans literally become the global shaper of the earth?”

In 2009, the International Commission on Stratigraphy, through its Subcommission of Quaternary Stratigraphy, created the Anthropocene Working Group (AGW) that is officially charged to examine whether the Anthropocene should be added as a formal time interval in the geologic time scale (following the Holocene, the current geological epoch after the last ice age) and, if so, what should mark its beginning. Shortly after its formation, Ellis was asked to join the Anthropocene Working Group as an expert on human transformation of the biosphere.

Scientists today disagree about when human impact on Earth reached levels sufficient to identify the start of the Anthropocene. Did this come with early forest clearing and agricultural production some 5,000 – 8,000 years ago? Or did this begin with European colonization of the Americas? Or very recently, with the Great Acceleration of environmental change that began in the 1950s?

Ellis tackles this question and others in his new book, Anthropocene: A Very Short Introduction. Right now the Great Acceleration of the 1950s is the leading candidate for the Anthropocene’s beginning, but heated discussions are ongoing, and will likely continue even after a formal Anthropocene is defined in the Geologic Time Scale, which could occur as early as 2020, when the International Union of Geological Science next meets.

The book Anthropocene builds on Ellis’s earlier writing about the complexities, evolution, and controversies surrounding the emergence of humans as a force transforming Earth in The New York Times, The Economist, and other media. Ellis offers readers new to this debate varying viewpoints from geologists, geographers, environmental scientists, archaeologists, political scientists, and scholars of the humanities. In exploring how people have impacted air and water quality, plant and animal life, and our own health and wellbeing through practices that have made our immediate lives easier but are also having serious, long-term consequences for the health of the planet.

“The Anthropocene engages us in seeking new narratives about what it means to be human, from humans as environmental destroyers to humans as the salvation of this planet,” explains Erle Ellis.

“One of the biggest questions about the Anthropocene is whether it should be considered to be a bad thing and the reason that it’s such a big question is because so many of the definitions of what humans are doing to this planet are negative things, like changing the climate and causing mass extinction,” says Ellis. “Yet, on the other hand, the Anthropocene is not over, and it really remains to be seen what we’re going to make of this human time period.”

Ultimately, Ellis argues, “We humans are going to shape the future of this planet.” So, he asks, “what kind of planet are we going to shape?”

Banner image: Grand Erg Oriental, Algeria, October 31, 2017. Image provided by the Sally Ride EarthKAM@Space Camp on the International Space Station.

I have a master bedroom to sublet. It's a 2 bedroom and a den style-apartment at the Mount Ridge Apartments in Catonsville. The room is ready, message me if you want to move in now, or by the 1st of July. Its a 6-minute drive to campus and the room is spacious! email me at ojialor1@umbc.edu.

I'll be subleasing the room only for the month of July.

You don't need to pay a security deposit! 

The UMBC shuttle comes there!

You'll live with 2 other females

It's a friendly home, as everyone is nice and keep to themselves for the most part.