Benedikt Bitterli

@mirror2mask Congratulations!

I’m thrilled to share some exciting news – I’m stepping into the role of Chief Technology Officer at Activision! It’s truly an honor to join this trailblazing team. I’m excited to be a part of a team that continues to push the boundaries in the gaming industry!

Excited to share some personal news!

@ossim_zack @iliyang @BoZhu88252235 @wkjarosz Congratulations Zack! Wishing all the best for your future endeavors.

It's been a couple days now and it still hasn't set in that I finished defending my dissertation, but I did! I'd like to thank my committee @iliyang, @BoZhu88252235, Peter Winkler, and especially my advisor @wkjarosz. Time to see what the future brings! @wjarosz/111404425615256074" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener">mathstodon.xyz/@wjarosz/11140…

@yiningkarlli I don't know what you're talking about! I'm only 300 hours into my Space Exploration save, and I'm at least halfway done!

Every time I read about an amazing new update to Factorio (or read about the Space Exploration mod), I really want to play Factorio but I'm also further convinced that I must avoid Factorio like the plague because it will consume 100% of my free time. factorio.com/blog/post/fff-…

@SteinbergShlomi Congratulations!

Happy to announce that I have joined UWaterloo as assistant professor. If you are interested in doing a PhD in rendering or light transport, check out ssteinberg.xyz/students.

@Tobi4sDE Is that a custom flex PCB in the second image?

The fact that you can trim a Wii mainboard to this size and still run games on it is absolutely insane! 🤯

@wenzeljakob "But they were, all of them, deceived, for another badge was made."

Hot take: we need a non-neural track for the remaining few papers of this category at conferences ;). Let's also give them a badge. Here is my humble proposal.

@nothings I'm curious, does GPT-4 do better at reversing words? I found Bard and GPT3.5 will output straight gibberish if you ask it to reverse words it hasn't seen in reverse before (and will then lie about it). Does GPT-4 do better than memorizing?

@SteinbergShlomi Congratulations!

All scenes on the rendering resources page have been updated to support Mitsuba 3. Big thanks to @seb_spe for doing the work! Grab the scenes here: benedikt-bitterli.me/resources/

@kerensharon1 This is awesome! Thanks for sharing this.

also I once computed a lens model for the cluster you're about to see, here's a sneak peek. The model is publicly available on the MAST/RELICS portal archive.stsci.edu/prepds/relics/

Looking forward to (virtually) presenting our work with @ejdeon about accelerating microfacet multiple scattering at EGSR later today! twitch.tv/egsr2022

@TubeTimeUS Wow! Absolutely incredible photos. I was not previously familiar with your work but preordered immediately. Extremely well done!

I'm happy to announce my new book, Open Circuits! Windell Oskay and I painstakingly cross sectioned, cut, sanded, polished, and cleaned over 100 electronic components and took sumptuous photos. Check out the sample chapter! nostarch.com/open-circuits

@_AlecJacobson Congratulations! Well deserved.

Well, well, well. I have been approved for tenure. 🤗 Maybe I'll never update my academic website ever again.

@levork I wholeheartedly support this effort. Flammekueche is delicious!

@BenKrasnow When processing glass on a mill/lathe, is there concern about glass dust/slurry going into the ways? Do you have tricks to deal with that or is it a non-issue?

If you want to cleanly cut glass, the secret search term you should use is "resin bonded" diamond wheel. eg mscdirect.com/product/detail… I can't believe how much smoother this is compared to the more common electroplated diamond wheels.

@yiningkarlli @tylermorganwall Wow! I knew phone lenses did weird stuff, but that's incredible. I really wonder how they even manufacture lenses like this - is this some kind of injection molded plastic, or is this a wholly different exotic manufacturing process I've never heard of?

@tylermorganwall As an example, modern smartphone lenses are crazy. Here's the design used on the iPhone 7; every single lens element is highly aspherical with a very large number of correction coefficients; this lens completely breaks the existing poly optics implementation from the 2016 paper.

So what started as a weekend project to implement polynomial optics lenses in my hobby renderer has turned into a many-month crazy rabbit hole. Originally I was going to write a blog post about it; my outline has now expanded into what I think will be 3 or 4 fairly large posts.

@SteinbergShlomi Congratulations!

Happy to share that I am a recipient of the Nvidia Ph.D. fellowship for 2022-2023. blogs.nvidia.com/blog/2021/12/1…

@BrianKaris Super interesting! Same fidelity than NeRF, much faster training, but much poorer fidelity per bit (~500MB vs 5MB). Neural networks are not magic, but they are data efficient basis functions in this case (i.e. natural scenes).

“Our experiments suggest the key element of Neural Radiance Fields is not the neural network but the differentiable volumetric renderer.”

It's done! I successfully passed my PhD defense today. A big thanks to my thesis committee, @wkjarosz, @BoZhu88252235, @jaakkolehtinen, Steve Marschner and Peter Winkler for committing their time, and their kind comments. Onward to new things!