2019 Grad Fellows

NVIDIA Graduate Fellowship Results for 2019

We are excited to announce the 2019 NVIDIA Graduate Fellowship recipients!

We know that there is incredibly important work taking place at universities worldwide, and the NVIDIA Graduate Fellowship Program allows us to demonstrate our commitment to academia in supporting research that spans all areas of computing innovation. Again this year, emphasis was given to students pushing the envelope in artificial intelligence, deep neural networks, autonomous vehicles, and related fields.

Fluidic Elastomer Actuators for Haptic Interactions in Virtual Reality

Virtual reality experiences via immersive optics and sound are becoming ubiquitous; there are several consumer systems (e.g., Oculus Rift and HTC Vive) now available with these capabilities. Other sensory experiences, such as that of touch remain elusive in this field. The most successful examples of haptic sensation (e.g., Nintendo 64's Rumble Pack and its descendants) are vibrotactile, which do not afford for persistent, morphological shape experiences.

Mapping Images to Scene Graphs with Permutation-Invariant Structured Prediction

Machine understanding of complex images is a key goal of artificial intelligence. One challenge underlying this task is that visual scenes contain multiple inter-related objects, and that global context plays an important role in interpreting the scene. A natural modeling framework for capturing such effects is structured prediction, which optimizes over complex labels, while modeling within-label interactions. However, it is unclear what principles should guide the design of a structured prediction model that utilizes the power of deep learning components.

Yashraj Narang

I lead the Seattle Robotics Lab (SRL) in NVIDIA Research. Team members are experts in perception, task and motion planning, control, reinforcement learning, imitation learning, simulation, sim-to-real transfer, and VLAs. We take an AI, compute, and simulation-driven approach to solve some of the hardest problems in robotics.

Note: The Publications section below is incomplete. Please see Google Scholar for a complete list of publications and patents.

Interactive Stable Ray Tracing

Interactive ray tracing applications running on commodity hardware can suffer from objectionable temporal artifacts due to a low sample count. We introduce stable ray tracing, a technique that improves temporal stability without the over-blurring and ghosting artifacts typical of temporal post-processing filters.

Light-Weight Protocols for Wire-Speed Ordering

We describe light-weight protocols for selective packet ordering in out-of-order networks that carry memory traffic.

Exploiting Idle Resources in a High-Radix Switch for Supplemental Storage

A general-purpose switch for a high-performance network is usually designed with symmetric ports providing credit-based flow control and error recovery via link-level retransmission. Because port buffers must be sized for the longest links and modern asymmetric network topologies have a wide range of link lengths, we observe that there can be a significant amount of unused buffer memory, particularly in edge switches. We also observe that the tiled architecture used in many high-radix switches contains an abundance of internal bandwidth.

Phantom Ray-Hair Intersector

We present a new approach to ray tracing swept volumes along trajectories defined by cubic Bézier curves. It performs at two-thirds of the speed of ray-triangle intersection, allowing essentially even treatment of such primitives in ray tracing applications that require hair, fur, or yarn rendering.

 

FocusAR: Auto-focus Augmented Reality Eyeglasses for both Real World and Virtual Imagery

We describe a system which corrects dynamically for the focus of the real world surrounding the near-eye display of the user and simultaneously the internal display for augmented synthetic imagery, with an aim of completely replacing the user prescription eyeglasses. The ability to adjust focus for both real and virtual stimuli will be useful for a wide variety of users, but especially for users over 40 years of age who have limited accommodation range.

A Closed-form Solution to Photorealistic Image Stylization

Photorealistic image stylization concerns transferring style of a reference photo to a content photo with the constraint that the stylized photo should remain photorealistic. While several photorealistic image stylization methods exist, they tend to generate spatially inconsistent stylizations with noticeable artifacts. In this paper, we propose a method to address these issues. The proposed method consists of a stylization step and a smoothing step.