Gabriel Taubin


Associate Professor

Phone: (401)-863-1484
Fax : (401)-863-7670
taubin@brown.edu
http://mesh.brown.edu/taubin

Research Interests

Prof. Taubin's main research interests fall within the following disciplines: Applied Computational Geometry, Computer Graphics, Geometric Modeling, 3D Photography, and Computer Vision. Since his graduate student days his research has been related to the development of efficient, simple, and mathematically sound algorithms to capture and operate on 3D objects represented as polygonal meshes. During his tenure at IBM he emphasised technologies to enable the use of 3D models for Web-based applications, but in recent years he has been interested in smart cameras, embedded systems, visual sensor networks, and in particular, in real-time distributed audio/visual signal processing algorithms, and applications.

Today Prof. Taubin is more interested in dynamic shape representation, shape capture, and processing. In currently funded multi-disciplinary projects he is exploring not only the mathematical foundations of these problems, but also applications in medicine, archaeology, surveillance and security, forensics, user-computer interaction, and reverse engineering.

Biography

Prof. Taubin earned a Licenciado en Ciencias Matemáticas degree from the University of Buenos Aires, Argentina, and a Ph.D. degree in Electrical Engineering from Brown University. In 1990 he joined IBM, where during a thirteen years career in the Research Division he held various positions, including Research Staff Member and Research Manager. In 2003 he joined the Brown University School of Engineering as an Associate Professor of Engineering and Computer Science.

While on sabbatical from IBM during the 2000-2001 academic year, he was appointed Visiting Professor of Electrical Engineering at the California Institute of Technology. While on sabbatical from Brown during the Spring semester of 2010, Prof. Taubin was appointed Visiting Associate Professor of Media Arts and Sciences at MIT. During this time he was associated with the Camera Culture Group, MIT Media Lab. Prof. Taubin is the current Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications Magazine, he serves as a member of the Editorial Board of the Geometric Models journal, and has served as associate editor of the IEEE Transactions of Visualization and Computer Graphics. Prof. Taubin was named IEEE Fellow for his contributions to the development of three-dimensional geometry compression technology and multimedia standards.

During his tenure at the IBM T. J. Watson Research Center, he belonged to the Exploratory Computer Vision group, he created and managed the Visual and Geometric Computing group, and towards the end, lead a team effort within the Pervasive Computing Solutions group to design and build miniature smart cameras for real-time audio/visual signal processing applications. During these years Prof. Taubin made significant theoretical and practical contributions to the field now called Digital Geometry Processing: to 3D shape capturing and surface reconstruction, to geometric modeling, geometry compression, progressive transmission, signal processing, and display of discrete surfaces. The 3D geometry compression technology that he developed with his group was incorporated into the MPEG-4 standard, and became integral part of IBM products.