My two advices/suggestions to both juniors and seniors: be weird and be curious.

Clément Canonne@ccanonne.github.io · 4d ago

"We're all worried," as what it means to do research (in my field, Theoretical CS) seems to be shifting, and shifting fast. What to do? Senior researchers must lead by example, knowing that not everything will pan out. What I'm suggesting below may not work everywhere, but here's my own advice: 1/

"We're all worried," as what it means to do research (in my field, Theoretical CS) seems to be shifting, and shifting fast. What to do? Senior researchers must lead by example, knowing that not everything will pan out. What I'm suggesting below may not work everywhere, but here's my own advice: 1/

Hopefully one last SIGGRAPH advertisement. I, myself, yours truly, will present on Haolin's behalf a data-driven method for joint adaptive sampling and quadrature for integration. Wed R408A. In the end of the talk I'll argue why everyone is doing the wrong thing. Paper: suikasibyl.github.io/nqr

More SIGGRAPH advertisements: my student Trevor will talk about his work on making ReSTIR significantly more efficient for rendering caustics. The talk is on Wednesday 9:20am at the ReSTIR session (Room 408A). Also check out the paper if you're interested! cwyman.org/papers/tog25...

For people coming to SIGGRAPH next week: Xuan will present this paper on Thursday 9:50am in the "Prevent Collision" session in Room 403A. Come chat with us!

Tzu-Mao Li@tzumaoli.bsky.social · 2mo ago

github.com/txstc55/yasps Check out Xuan's work on a new programming language for writing modular and high-performance physical simulation code from energy definition. The key is two differentiable relational operators (join/union) that model the sparsity structure between the attributes and energy.

People who're coming to SIGGRAPH next week: this paper will be presented by Venkat next Tuesday at 9:50am in the "Layout & Procedural" session at room 403A (I don't know why they put us in this session =.=). Please come and chat with us!

Tzu-Mao Li@tzumaoli.bsky.social · 3mo ago

iveevi.github.io/rcgp/ Check out Venkat's work on a new graphics programming language on statically enforcing correctness of heterogeneous graphics programs (e.g., resources declared on host must match shaders at compile time). The compiler is open sourced and let us know if you have any comment!

Next week at #SIGGRAPH 2026, we'll present "Locality-Aware Automatic Differentiation on the GPU for Mesh-Based Computations," with Rahul Goel, Jonathan Ragan-Kelley, and @justinmsolomon.bsky.social . Talk: Mon., July 20, 2:50 PM, Room 403-B Paper: dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/... More below (1/7):

Releasing Walk on Spheres Extensions (WoSX): a GPU-accelerated C++/Python library for Monte Carlo physics simulation on complex geometry. Think path tracing but for physics beyond light transport: heat, electrostatics, potential flow, deformation & more! github.com/nv-tlabs/wosx

cseweb.ucsd.edu/~tzli/cool_r... I started to maintain a list of homepages of graphics academics who I think did cool work, are younger than me, and are not my current/past students. It's a living list so if I read any cool papers I'll add the authors to the list. I encourage you to do the same!

cseweb.ucsd.edu/~tzli/abstra... Check out the slides of my recent internal talk about abstraction in CS research. Apart from some propaganda of our recent works, the key message is that "abstraction doesn’t, and shouldn’t replace friction" (a corollary of Spolsky's "law of leaky abstraction").

github.com/txstc55/yasps Check out Xuan's work on a new programming language for writing modular and high-performance physical simulation code from energy definition. The key is two differentiable relational operators (join/union) that model the sparsity structure between the attributes and energy.

I helping recalibrate Waterloo’s software engineering program (and to some degree CS) for the age of AI. I wrote an essay on the challenges I’m seeing. www.victorzhong.com/writing/the-...

iveevi.github.io/rcgp/ Check out Venkat's work on a new graphics programming language on statically enforcing correctness of heterogeneous graphics programs (e.g., resources declared on host must match shaders at compile time). The compiler is open sourced and let us know if you have any comment!

Out now: AI and the Murder of Truth. And Air Bud. On AI, education, fascism, paying the Dane-geld, and why there ain’t no rule says a dog can’t play basketball. The follow up to last year’s “You are a better writer than AI.” If you liked that video, this is worth your time. youtu.be/sETvPBVKBAY

AI and the Murder of Truth. And Air Bud.

YouTube video by josh (with parentheses)

youtu.be

For people who are attending Eurographics in the coming week: my student Trevor will talk about his latest work on making ReSTIR efficient when reusing from a large number of neighbors. The key is an unbiased estimation of the MIS weight. See the paper below. research.nvidia.com/labs/rtr/pub...

"...it would be as though our brain, which constitutes the physical, material condition of our thoughts, were unable to follow what we do, so that from now on we would indeed need artificial machines to do our thinking and speaking." Hannah Arendt, 'The Human Condition', 1958.

EGSR 2026's call for papers is out: egsr2026.inria.fr/call-for-pap...

I have procrastinated on writing so much that I wrote an entire document on writing tips: cseweb.ucsd.edu/~tzli/writin... Probably not much is new but I find I still need to repeat the same things to my students regularly. Will update this document over time hopefully.

"AI has transformed programming forever", but what does that even mean? I mean, Sublime Text has transformed the way I and many programmed forever since it came out (with much less cost), but I don't see the same amount of excitement around it. Sorry, have to rant, back to writing proposals. : (

cseweb.ucsd.edu/~tzli/novelt... I gave an internal talk at UCSD last year regarding "novelty" in computer science research. In it I "debunked" some of the myth people seem to have about what is good research in computer science these days. People seemed to like it, so I thought I should share.

Check out our recent SIGGRAPH Asia paper on differentiating programs that integrates over discontinuous functions (yes, again), which got the best paper award! yashbelhe.github.io/asd/index.html The first author Yash is looking for a job yashbelhe.github.io so talk to us if you're interested.

I gave a talk at Pacific Graphics 2025 on the topic of "Classical Computer Graphics in the Age of Generative AI". I've uploaded the recording to Youtube today. www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vyci...

"Classical Computer Graphics in the Age of Generative AI", Pacific Graphics 2025 Keynote, Tzu-Mao Li

YouTube video by Tzu-Mao Li

youtube.com

🎄 Introducing our paper A Generalizable Light Transport 3D Embedding for Global Illumination lnkd.in/gQUMSAyV . 🙈 Just as Transformers learn long-range relationships between words or pixels, our new paper shows they can also learn how light interacts and bounces around a 3D scene.

Today we're unveiling our newest project: OpenQMC! Developed & contributed to the Foundation by @framestore.bsky.social, OpenQMC aims to improve the fidelity & efficiency of rendering photoreal moving images for film, TV, gaming & advertising. Read more on our blog: www.aswf.io/blog/openqmc...

OpenQMC Becomes an Academy Software Foundation Project - ASWF

Developed by Framestore, OpenQMC has improved the fidelity and speed of rendering Hollywood blockbusters such as Barbie, Superman, Wicked, F1 the Movie and How to Train Your Dragon LOS ANGELES, CA, Oc...

aswf.io

Anything outside of Nyquist-Shannon limit is "hallucination". It used to have cooler names aliasing/noise. I think the key difference between the two is that human are good at catching aliasing/noise (even anti-aliasing), but not good at noticing hallucination. So "hallucination" feels like cheating

My lab will be recruiting at all levels. PhD students, postdocs, and a research engineering position (worldwide for PhD/postdoc, EU candidates only for the engineering position). If you're at SIGGRAPH, I'd love to talk to you if you are interested in any of these.

"Hallucinations on the future of real-time rendering", High Performance Graphics 2025 keynote: c0de517e.com/023_hpg.htm

Rendering nerds! Check out our latest work "Vector-Valued Monte Carlo Integration Using Ratio Control Variates" that has just gotten the best paper award at SIGGRAPH 2025. This paper presents a method that reduces variance of a wide range of rendering and diff. rendering tasks with negligible cost.

An update, a bit of retrospection, and a call for you, yes, you, to help JCGT a bit: www.realtimerendering.com/blog/jcgt-is...