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Lecture "Differentiable Simulation of Light" by Dr. Wenzel Jokob

I am pleased to invite you to a special lecture titled "Differential Simulation of Light" by Prof. Dr. Wenzel from ETH Zurich, renowned for his work on the Mitsuba renderer, inverse graphics, and appearance modeling.

Title:

Differentiable Simulation of Light

Abstract:

Their realism of rendering techniques has steadily grown within the last decade, to the extent that renderings are now often indistinguishable from reality. Inverse rendering flips this process around: the images (e.g. photos) are now the input, and we seek seek a virtual world that explains them. This is a more difficult problem with applications in diverse scientific fields that require turning pictures into 3D models or other physical parameters.My group works on methods that solve this task by propagating derivatives through a simulation. Although intuitive, this idea leads to numerous theoretical and practical difficulties. I will give an overview of the key challenges and recent progress towards building robust and efficient differentiable rendering methods, and how they have influenced the development of the Mitsuba renderer developed at EPFL.

Short Bio:

Wenzel's research revolves around inverse graphics, material appearance modeling and physically based rendering algorithms. He is interested in solving real-world problems using invertible simulations and developing algorithms and systems to do so at scale. Wenzel has received the ACM SIGGRAPH Significant Researcher award, the Eurographics Young Researcher Award, and an ERC Starting Grant. His group develops the Mitsuba renderer, a research-oriented rendering system, and he has created widely used open source frameworks, including pybind11, nanobind, Instant Meshes (SGP Software Award recipient), and Dr.Jit.
https://rgl.epfl.ch/people/wjakob/