Hollywood Special Effects via Computer Vision, Machine

Learning, and Physical Simulation

These days my work on special effects focuses quite a bit on face and body
animation and simulation, trying to outwit the uncanny valley. Traditionally, one
used only computer vision techniques for this sort of work, but we're now
successfully mixing in quite a bit of physical simulation as well. We have many
ongoing projects mixing in real world data and simulation in order to create more
realistic Hollywood special effects (cloth is next).

CS205L: Continuous Mathematical Methods with an

Emphasis on Machine Learning
A survey of numerical approaches to the continuous mathematics with emphasis
on machine and deep learning. Although motivated from the standpoint of
machine learning, the course will focus on the underlying mathematical methods
including computational linear algebra and optimization, as well as special topics
related to training/using neural networks including automatic differentiation via
backward propagation, steepest/gradient decent, momentum methods and
adaptive time stepping for ordinary differential equations, etc. Students have the
option of doing written homework and either a take-home or in class exams with
no programming required, or may skip the exams and instead do a programming
project. (Replaces CS205A, and satisfies all similar requirements.) Prerequisites:
Math 51; Math 104 or 113 or equivalent or comfortable with the associated
material.

Brief Bio
Fedkiw received his Ph.D. in Mathematics from UCLA and spent part of his
postdoctoral studies at Caltech in Aeronautics before joining the Stanford
Computer Science Department. He was awarded an Academy Award from the
Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (twice: 2008 and 2015), the
National Academy of Science Award for Initiatives in Research, a Packard
Foundation Fellowship, a Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and
Engineers (PECASE), a Sloan Research Fellowship, the ACM Siggraph
Significant New Researcher Award, an Office of Naval Research Young
Investigator Program Award (ONR YIP), the Okawa Foundation Research Grant,
the Robert Bosch Faculty Scholarship, the Robert N. Noyce Family Faculty
Scholarship, two distinguished teaching awards, etc. He has published over 125
research papers in computational physics, graphics, and vision, a book on level
set methods, and is currently working at the interface between physical
simulation and machine learning - recently joining the Stanford Artificial
Intelligence Laboratory (SAIL) in 2017. Currently, he serves on the editorial
board of the Journal of Computational Physics. For over 18 years, he has been a
consultant with Industrial Light + Magic, receiving screen credits on movies such
as "Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines", "Star Wars: Episode I