Matt Olson

"Nobody is really smart enough to program computers."
--Steve McConnell

Research Interests

Computer graphics.

Broadly speaking, I'm interested in rendering and illumination, especially in real time. I'm generally curious about visibility determination and multiresolution meshes, particularly when they play nicely with each other and with modern GPU architectures. I also enjoy thinking about spatial data structures.

Specifically, I'm working on object-space silhouette techniques. See my research page for all the gory details.

Related Interests

Computer graphics is a programming-heavy discipline, so I'm interested in pragmatic programming and software engineering technique. I enjoy programming in C, Ruby, Haskell, and various dialects of Lisp. I'd love to add OCaml and Erlang to the list, but haven't yet found the time.

I like graph theory and computability theory. I'm also starting to enjoy (and maybe coming to understand) geometric algebra.

Academic History

My supervisor is Dr. Richard (Hao) Zhang.

I work in the GrUVi lab.

Ph.D. (2003-)
School of Computing Science
Simon Fraser University
Burnaby, British Columbia, Canada

B.Sc. Honours/IIP (1998-2003)
Department of Computing Science
University of Alberta
Edmonton, Alberta, Canada

My Erdös Number is at most seven.

Contact Information

email: matto (at) cs (dot) sfu (dot) ca