Current and last positions
- Since 2006: Researcher in the ALICE reseach team (LORIA)
- 2005-2006: ATER at IUT Charlemagne in Nancy (France), in the ALICE reseach team (LORIA) : Equivalent to Teaching/Research Assistant
- 2004-2005 : Engineer working on large models visualization in the CRVHP Project (LORIA)
- 2003-2004 : Post-Doctoral position in the eDAM team, working on the geometric objects involved in protein docking
- 1998-2003 : PHD on "automatic generation of texture atlas" supervised by Jean-Claude PAUL and Bruno LEVY
Research Statement
My research project is to improve the data structures used to represent geometric objects. This is motivated by the large number of algorithms having a complexity that is directly linked with the representation of the objects they manipulate. For instance, the complexity of a surface is evaluated in terms of number of triangles instead of the complexity of the object shapes. I believe that better object representations lead to more efficient algorithms that do not waste time and simplicity with non optimal data structures.
Cellular complexes are a good choice to represent geometric objects because they make it possible to handle any topology (such as surfaces handles) and to explicit discontinuities (1D hard edges / 0D cones shape) of any lower dimensions. However, most commonly used cellular complexes such as triangulated surfaces oversample the topology to counter a weak geometry representation (piecewise linear). My objective is that most of the cell corresponds to a "natural" feature of the object, given a "natural" multi-scale representation of the object.
Softwares and Applications to which i have contributed:
I have worked on Graphite, our plateform to test graphics algortithms. My main contributions were a system of collection attributes (used to dynamically bind attributes to cellular complexes) and a generation of Continuous Levels of Detail (used for multi-grid version of our algorithms).
I have also worked on Intersurf, the VMD plugin that exibits the interaction between groups of atoms by a surface.
Publications:
International Journal
- Nicolas Ray, Bruno Vallet, Laurent Alonso et Bruno Lévy, Geometry Aware Direction Field Processing, {\it conditionally accepted to ACM Transactions on Graphics}
- Nicolas Ray, Bruno Lévy, Huamin Wang, Greg Turk et Bruno Vallet, Material Space Texturing, {\it conditionally accepted TVCG}
- Nicolas Ray, Bruno Vallet, Wan-Chiu Li et Bruno Lévy, N-Symmetry Direction Fields on Surfaces of Arbitrary Genus, {\it ACM Transactions on Graphics, april 2008 - Presented at SIGGRAPH 2008}
- Nicolas Ray, Wan Chiu Li, Bruno Lévy, Alla Scheffer, et Pierre Alliez. Periodic Global Parameterization, {\it ACM Transactions on Graphics, October 2006 }
- Bruno Lévy, Sylvain Petitjean, Nicolas Ray, et Jérôme Maillot. Least Squares Conformal Maps for Automatic Texture Atlas Generation. {\it In Journal ACM TOG, Special Interest Group on Computer Graphics - SIGGRAPH'02, San-Antonio, Texas, USA, 2002.}
- Wan-Chiu Li, Bruno Vallet, Nicolas Ray et Bruno Levy. Representing Higher-Order Singularities in Vector Fields on Piecewise Linear Surfaces {\it IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, September 2006}
- Nicolas Ray, Xavier Cavin, Jean-Claude Paul et Bernard Maigret. Dynamic interface between proteins, {\it In Journal of Molecular Graphics and Modelling Volume 23, Issue 4, January 2005, Pages 347-354}
International Conferences
- Wan-Chiu Li, Nicolas Ray et Bruno Lévy, Automatic and Interactive Mesh to T-Spline Conversion, {\it EG/ACM Symposium on Geometry Processing, 2006}
- Nicolas Ray et Bruno Lévy. Hierarchical Least Squares Conformal Maps. {\it In 11th Pacific Conference on Computer Graphics and Applications 2003 - PG'03, Canmore, Canada, October 2003.}
- Nicolas Ray, Jean-Christophe Ulysse, Xavier Cavin et Bruno Lévy. {\it Generation of Radiosity Texture Atlas for Realistic Real-Time Rendering. In Eurographics 2003, Granada, Spain, September 2003.}
- Nicolas Ray, Xavier Cavin et Bernard Maigret. Interactive Poster : Visualizing the Interaction Between Two Proteins. In IEEE Visualization 2003, Seattle, USA, October 2003.
- Nicolas Ray, Boyer Anne et Charpillet François. {\it New Results about Anytime Heuristic Search. In Workshop on Monitoring and control of real-time intelligent systems - ECAI'98. Brighton, UK. 1998.}
Other Conferences
- Shi-Wei Luo, Nicolas Ray, Xavier Cavin, Bernard Maigret, Qing-Xiang Guo {\it Statistics Analysis in Protein-Protein Interactions: Organization and Contribution of Polar Effect Across Protein Interface CMTPI-2005 (October 29-November 1st, 2005)}
- Shi-Whei Luo, Nicolas Ray, Xavier Cavin and Bernard Maigret {\it Statistical analysis of protein-protein interactions: Organization and contribution of interfacial residues JOBIM 2005 (July 6-8 2005)}
- Bernard Maigret, Alexandre Beautrait, Vincent Leroux, Matthieu Chavent, W. S. Cai, J. Xu, X. Shao, Xavier Cavin, Nicolas Ray, G. Moreau, J. H. Yao, F. YuThe {\it VSM (Virtual Screening Manager) Platform for Drug Design and Lead Discovery CMTPI-2005 (October 29-November 1st, 2005)}
PHD Thesis
Courses Taught
- ACSI (Analysis and Conception of Information Systems) (94 hours)
- Hardware Architecture (40 hours)
- Advance algorithmic (28 hours)
- Network (40 hours)
- Databases
- SQL
- C
- network
- Java
