Short Biography

Samer Barakat is a Ph.D. student in the Computer Science Department at Purdue University. He received a M.Sc. in computer engineering from Alexandria University, Egypt in 2007 and a M.Sc. in computer science from Purdue University in 2011. His research interests include interactive visual analysis of large-scale flow phenomena, characterization and visualization of salient structures in volumetric medical and engineering datasets, feature tracking and analysis, multifield visualization and query-driven visualization. Before joining Purdue, I worked as a project manager at Bibliotheca Alexandrina.

Curriculum Vitae can be found here.

Research

The amount of scientific data produced through simulations and experiments in engineering and medicine is continuously growing. These datasets often comprise multiple variables (or fields) that describe the physics of the considered phenomena. The purpose of visualization is to provide the user with graphical tools to discover and analyze the remarkable features exhibited by these datasets. In my thesis, I approach these features from the point of view of their characterization as geometric structures (e.g. manifolds in the spatial domain). Defining and extracting these structures is a challenging task, however. This is mainly due to the ambiguous nature of the features of interest and the computational cost of their extraction from very large-scale spatio-temporal domains. In addition, most visualization scenarios require interactivity to allow the user to steer the visual analysis, and provide a seamless exploration of the domain. In my work, I aim to devise new scalable and high-performance methods for the identification, extraction, and visualization of salient structures from 3D datasets. Applications of this research span fluid dynamics, medical imaging, and combustion research.

Publications

  • “Adaptive Refinement of the Flow Map using Sparse Samples,”
    S. Barakat, and X. Tricoche. IEEE Visualization Conference. 2013.
  • “Surface-Based Structure Analysis and Visualization for Multifield Time-Varying Datasets,”
    S. Barakat, M. Rütten, and X. Tricoche. IEEE Visualization Conference. 2012.
  • “Interactive Computation and Rendering of Finite-Time Lyapunov Exponent Fields,”
    S. Barakat, C. Garth, and X. Tricoche. IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics. 2012.
  • “Efficient Extraction of High-Quality Crease Surfaces for Visual Analysis,”
    S. Barakat, N. Andrysco, and X. Tricoche. Computer Graphics Forum 30(3) (Proc. EuroVis 2011), pp. 961-970. 2011.
  • “High Performance Structure Extraction for Visualization,”
    S. Barakat, and X. Tricoche. Doctoral colloquium, IEEE Visualization Conference. 2011.
  • “Beyond Topology : A Lagrangian Metaphor to Visualize 3D Tensor Fields,”
    X. Tricoche, M. Hlawitschka, S. Barakat, and C. Garth. New Developments in the Visualization and Processing of Tensor Fields, D. Laidlaw, A. Vilanova (eds.) Springer 2011.
  • “An Image-Based Approach to Interactive Crease Extraction and Rendering,”
    S. Barakat, and X. Tricoche. Procedia Computer Science 1(1) (Proc. ICCS 2010), pp.1703-1712. 2010.
  • “Fuzzy Online Adaptive Controller for Non-linear Systems,”
    S. Barakat, Master’s Thesis. 2007.

Teaching

Education

  • Ph.D candidate, Department of Compuer Science, Purdue University, USA (Expected 2013)
  • M.Sc., Department of Compuer Science, Purdue University, USA (2011)
  • M.Sc., Department of Computer Systems, Faculty of Engineering, Alexandria University, EGY (2007)
  • B.E., Department of Computer Systems, Faculty of Engineering, Alexandria University, EGY (2003)