The Secret Art of Staying Current By Mark Bolstad Raytheon/ARL

What is the Secret Art to Staying Current?

Jimbo’s Appalachia Challenge

Technology is a moving target New technology is coming on-line –Blue Gene/L –Cell Processor –Multi-core chips Current technology is evolving –~700 updates per week on Freshmeat –Upcoming offerings from Nvidia and ATI

Four Levels of Ignorance Level 0 –“You know” Level 1 –“I know that I don’t know” Level 2 –“I know that I don’t know, and I don’t know how to find it” Level 3 –“I don’t know that I don’t know”

Which levels apply? We’d like to have Level 0 ignorance for everything –Yea, right More realistic: –Remove Level 2 and Level 3 Ignorance –“Selective Level 1 Ignorance”

Things I choose to ignore HTML Perl Web Development Microsoft APIs and Tools –Single Platform technologies FORTRAN and Java Stupid PowerPoint Tricks

Things I choose to ignore HTML Perl Web Development Microsoft APIs and Tools –S–Single Platform technologies FORTRAN and Java Stupid PowerPoint Tricks

Things I choose to track Rendering –Hardware, software, parallel High Performance Computing Out-of-core techniques APIs and Libraries –Things that enhance the software Tools –Things that enhance the development process

Quiz: Which of the following are true? Using Google, I can –Get a satellite image of any location in the US?

Quiz: Which of the following are true? Using Google, I can –Get a satellite image of any location in the US? –True Enter address here

Quiz: Which of the following are true? Using Google, I can –Solve for the derivative of 5x 3 + 3x 2 - 4?

Quiz: Which of the following are true? Using Google, I can –Solve for the derivative of 5x 3 + 3x 2 - 4? –False, Google can’t solve abstract equations –But: sine(30 degrees) 0x7d3 in roman numerals 0b *0b1001

Quiz: Which of the following are true? Using Google, I can –Find a satellite image from your phone number?

Quiz: Which of the following are true? Using Google, I can –Find a satellite image from your phone number? –Partially True Only some phone numbers work –Enter phone number

Quiz: Which of the following are true? Using Google, I can –Track a package?

Quiz: Which of the following are true? Using Google, I can –Track a package –True, any UPS, Fed Ex, DHL packages can be tracked directly from Google –You can also: Check a patent application: patent Vehicle ID Numbers UPC Codes

What’s My Technique? Web sites News groups Mailing Lists Journals School Books Co-workers

Web Sites Standard Fare: –Slashdot ( –Freshmeat ( –Daily Rotation ( Others: –OpenGL.org ( –CG Channel ( –Tom’s Hardware (

News Groups Usenet News –Not as much traffic, low signal-to-noise –Groups.google.com for archive Yahoo groups –Can read on-line, or receive s or digests

Mailing Lists ParaView OpenDX Performer Rendering Eiffel

Journals IEEE CG & A IEEE Transactions on Graphics ACM TOG Conference Proceedings –SIGGRAPH –I3D –EG Workshop on Rendering –Visualization

School Back in graduate program –Advisor is Marc Olano Wrote first programmable shading system for hardware Part of the OpenGL Shader development at SGI.

Books “Introduction to Algorithms” “Real-time Shading” “Production Rendering” “Realistic Image Synthesis”

Other major time sink Insert obligatory picture of children here.

So? What’s your technique(s)?