So your coworkers, presumably health care professionals, refused to accept the most basic public health measure, and expected to keep working, presumably in proximity to vulnerable populations? I hardly think their employer is the unreasonable party here. (E.g. I also wouldn't hire a lawyer who advocated trial by combat or a chemist who advocated alchemy...)
You might also like "Fluid Engine Development" if this stuff is your cup of tea. I believe there is complete code with it.
https://fluidenginedevelopment.org/
The most recent Times Higher Ed world university rankings for Computer Science put Toronto at 17, Waterloo at 23. The QS rankings give Toronto 11, Waterloo 26. You can debate the merit of rankings, but there's simply no credible way to argue that a school that routinely appears in in the world's top 30 is "mediocre/trash".
Relatedly, Waterloo is in fact included in the Budget 2017 funding for Canada's overall AI initiative, of which this Vector stuff is a part:
"In this budget, the government announced the creation of the Pan-Canadian Artificial Intelligence Strategy, which will promote collaboration between AI hubs Toronto, Kitchener-Waterloo, Montreal, and Edmonton. It will be dedicating $125 million towards the launch of this strategy."
This is just concern trolling.
Obviously all these issues are important to address; simply pointing to another issue does not contribute to solving either of them.
Yes, there is a fair amount of similarly and connection in the underlying mesh data structure. In fact, we published a paper on that aspect of the framework at SIGGRAPH a couple years back, which heavily cites the Surface Evolver work.
http://www.cs.columbia.edu/cg/multitracker/
Thanks! At this point, since this is really the first version of a new and different technique than is typical in graphics, the method is not near real-time. As you suggest, the offline setting is probably the most relevant for now. We are hopeful that future research may substantially accelerate it.
FWIW, I created this site 7 or 8 years ago during my PhD, just as a way to keep track of and organize all the papers coming out in my research field. Happy to answer questions or comments if you have any.
Agreed, very nice.
I've heard the speed issue mentioned as well, although slow compared to what, I wonder? I don't see offhand any fundamental reason why it would be dramatically slower than, say, a standard FLIP-based fluid sim. It amounts to advecting Lagrangian particles combined with solving the elastoplasticity equations on a Cartesian grid, with a snow-specific constitutive model.
I'm all for free software making inroads in government and elsewhere. I just wonder if it'd be better off recommending someone a little more, let's say... pragmatic, than Stallman as an advisor.
I would take some of this with a grain of salt; I distrust a religion prof who says academic research needs to solve more practical problems. The main practical problem he's trying to solve is selling more copies of his book.
As someone pursuing a PhD, I can tell that you that if you say "I'm doing a PhD in computer science" or "I'm doing a PhD in human geography," you still get the follow-up question, "so what exactly are you studying?" It's natural for people to want to engage you in conversation about your career, even if you both know that the minute nitty-gritty details are going to be far more involved than anyone would really want to hear about at a social gathering. I give my "elevator pitch" about my research, just like any founder would about his startup. If they are genuinely interested, then I talk about it, if not, I move on without getting hung up worrying about it. I also think that in this area at least, the "founder" vs. "normal" distinction is a bit unhelpful; many of the points you raise can be applied to most occupations.