Dieter Fellner's success story#
Hermann Maurer#
Dieter Fellner has worked in different areas of Computer Science and has contributed in many ways – ranging from the theoretical/algorithmic side to the applied side. His first publication (On Minimal Graphs; Theoretical Computer Science 17, 1982) was in the field of Formal Language Theory, a topic of his Master Thesis. For his PhD work he moved into the field to Computer Graphics as he was responsible to develop an interactive (and from the ‘web’ downloadable) editing system on the intelligent Videotex Decoder (called MUPID --- also mentioned elsewhere) – the first of its kind. That this wasn’t just an engineering task can be seen on research results which stem from challenges of this work. The Circle Brush Algorithm (ACM Transactions on Graphics, Vol. 8, No. 1, 1989), e.g., triggered the Section on ‘Thick Primitives’ in Foley et al (one of, if not the, standard reference books in Computer Graphics). The contributions on General Ellipses (e.g., ACM TOG Vol. 12, No. 3, 1993) were further results from his work in Videotex.
His approach to Computer Graphics has always been based on a clear algorithmic basis. This can be seen in his book on Computer Graphics, a text book in German (1st Ed 1988, 2nd Ed 1992) which has been used as the definite reference for many years (until it ran out of print).
After his Habilitation at the University of Technology Graz he accepted an offer from the Memorial University in St. John’s, Canada in 1989 and a Professorship (C3) at the University on Bonn, Germany, where he established the first Computer Graphics Group at this university.
At that time his focus was on algorithmic and software engineering aspects of the graphics rendering pipeline. In a close collaboration with a large German Cellular Phone Operator his ‘Modular Rendering Tool’ (MRT) became the basis for the first near-interactive simulation tool for radio wave propagation in urban environments. With this tool cellular phone networks could be planned based on extremely accurate predictions. His work is not only documented by a patent he holds together with his industrial partner from that time and which is still used world-wide in the daily planning/adjustment of cell networks. Seen from a health perspective his precise computations enabled cell operators to fine tune the antenna characteristics to the level where only absolutely necessary energy levels would be propagated by the multi-pole antennas within each cell.
In parallel he was the first to identify the challenge of non-textual materials in Digital Libraries – from the acquisition of the material to the indexing, automated computation of metadata to the delivery and to long-term preservation. He was successful in initiating a Strategic Research Initiative (DFG Schwerpunktprogramm), funded by the German Research Foundation, which started in 1997 and consisted of a research team of approx 50 researchers from all top-notch German groups contributing to this challenge. Under his leadership this initiative not only produced close to 800 publications, 200 Master’s Theses, 41 dissertations and 2 habilitations (in almost 7 years) – his initiative did influence the Research Agenda from the European Commission quite substantially.
In 1998 he accepted an offer from the Technical University of Braunschweig and became Professor of Computer Science and Founding Director of the Institute of Computer Graphics at that university. His main research contributions in this time were in the areas of color quantization (Best Paper Award of Eurographics’98), Hierarchical Radiosity on Curved Surfaces, Acceleration Data Structures for ray-object intersections in complex geometries, Collision Detection and Immersive Projection Technology. The last topic is of particular interest as his team was the only one capable to adapt single DLP technology for stereo projection – an R&D effort which in 2008 eventually had its break-through as the technological core of the stereo projector F10 AS3D from Projectiondesign.
In 2005 he moved his group to the Graz University of Technology and became professor and founding director of the Institute of Computer Graphics and Knowledge Visualization. The work in Graz can be characterized by his contributions to the description of geometric shapes based on semantic terms, subdivision surfaces and a generative modelling approach, his team started to work on while still located in Bonn.
His standing in the field is documented by his program chairmanship of the Eurographics Conference (the second top-notch conference in Computer Graphics next to ACM Siggraph) in 1997 and 2003, his election to Chairman of the Eurographics Association (1999–2000) and, finally, as Director of the Fraunhofer Institute of Computer Graphics (IGD) in Darmstadt, Germany, with a joint appointment as Professor of Computer Science and Director of the Institute of Graphical Interactive Systems (GRIS) at the Technical University of Darmstadt in 2006. In these functions he is now directing a Fraunhofer Institute in applied R&D in Visual Computing with approx. 320 researchers and a university institute of currently 30 researchers and PhD students. In 2008 has was appointed as a member of the IST Advisory Group (ISTAG) of the European Commission where he has been the main promoter of Internet3D.
Any further pages in alphabetic order of their title as created by you.
#
Just click at "Create new page", then type a short title and click OK, then add information on the empty page presented to you (including maybe a picture from your harddisk or a pdf-file by using the "Upload" Button) and finally click at "Save".
...no Data available yet!
