Graphics research at the University of Calgary is under the lead of Dr. Przemyslaw Prusinkiewicz, Dr. Faramarz Samavati, Dr. Mario Costa Sousa, and Dr. Usman Alim.

The focal point of Dr. P's work is the modeling, simulation and visualization of the development of plants. This area is very interesting because of its interdisciplinary character. Ideas pertinent to plant modeling are related to computer science (computer graphics, formal language theory, programming language design, and simulation), as well as biology, artificial life, mathematics, and physics. The modeling of plants has also an artistic flavor, since the beauty of plants presents a constant challenge for creating visually appealing models. read more...


Professor Samavati currently works on various aspects of Computer Graphics. In general terms, his research areas are Geometric Modeling, Sketch-Based Modeling, Visualizations and Non-photo Realistic Rendering. More specifically, the research topics in his area are Surface Modeling, Volume Modeling, Subdivision Surfaces, Flexible Projection, Least Squares, NURBS, Multiresolution and Wavelets. Faramarz Samavati currently supervises a group of very good graduate students. He also collaborates with several other researchers (Richard Bartels, Przemyslaw Prusinkiewicz, Mario Costa-Sousa, Brian Wyvill, Marina Gavrilova, Sheelagh Carpandale and Joaquim Jorge). He has over 50 technical papers in peer-reviewed journals and conferences. He is a Member of ACM and EG. Currently he is in the program committee of IMMERSCOM2007, ICIAR 2007, SBIM2007 and SMI2008. read more...


Dr. Costa Sousa's long-term research goal is to develop techniques to capture the enhancement and expressive capability of traditional illustrations, leading to a comprehensive formal illustrative visualization framework, methodology and software environment for computer-generated technical, medical and scientific illustrations. Over the past four years, he has been researching and developing methods to classify and encode the techniques, guidelines, processes that medical and scientific illustrators follow during the entire illustration production pipeline. read more...


Dr. Usman Alim is interested in addressing fundamental challenges in the areas of Scientific Visualization and Computer Graphics. This typically boils down to seeking better mathematical models for the representation and visualization of the underlying continuous phenomena. At the same time, computational cost is of the essence and one of the main challenges is to improve visual quality without incurring additional overhead. read more...