Stuart Levy
Research Programmer

Office: 2040 NCSA
Phone: (217) 244-1543
Email: @
Home Page: http://

Education
1975-1982 undergraduate at University of Minnesota, in Computer Science, specializing in human and machine languages; also studies in linguistics, physics, astronomy.

 

Areas of Expertise
UNIX systems programming
Astronomy & Astrophysics
openGL
Geometry, Computational Geometry
C, perl, Tcl

 

Projects
Main author of partiview, simple multiplatform desktop interactive 3-D graphical software for systems of particles etc. It was adopted by the AMNH Hayden Planetarium as the platform for displaying their Digital Universe model.

Adapted and maintain Star Renderer, efficient particle-based high-quality rendering software written by Loren Carpenter of Pixar, Inc.. Added support for new types of star particles, level-of-detail controls, etc. needed to allow Robert Patterson to build our Milky Way particle model.

Wrote bplay, high-performance movie playback software, which plays high-definition stereo uncompressed animations from a Linux PC with RAID array.

Wrote and maintain software tools for the visualization group for stereo control, rendering management, image and media conversion (including adapting imagery for dome environments), etc.

Contributed to several of our group's visualization outreach projects, most recently to "Black Holes: The Other Side of Infinity", digital planetarium dome show by Denver Museum of Nature and Science, and companion "Monster of the Milky Way" PBS NOVA program: animation, dome image processing, systems infrastructure support, liaison with scientists.

 

Publications
Patterson, Robert., D. Cox, S. Levy, A. Betts, M. Hall, "Visualization of an F3 Tornado within a Simulated Supercell Thunderstorm" in SIGGRAPH 2005 Conference Electronic Art and Animation Catalog, ACM: New York, Aug. 2005, pp. 248-249 and Electronic Theater DVD, SIGGRAPH Video Review Issue 150, no. 16.

Levy, Stuart, "Interactive 3-D visualization of particle systems with Partiview", in Proceedings of IAU Symposium 208, "Astrophysical Supercomputing Using Particles" July 2001.

 

Research Conference Presentations
Surendran, Dinoj and S. Levy., "Visualizing High Dimensional Datasets Using Partiview", interactive poster presentation in IEEE InfoVis 2004, Austin, TX, Oct 10-12.

Levy, S., "Telling Lies to Visualize", presented in workshop Visualization of Astrophysical Data: Bringing Together Science, Art, & Education, May 25-27, 2005, at KICP, University of Chicago.
http://virdir.ncsa.uiuc.edu/slevy/kicp/