Professor Alberto Paoluzzi was born in Rome on February 4, 1951. He graduated ”Magna cum Laude” in civil engineering at University of Rome ”La Sapienza” on 1975. He is married with 2 sons and lives in Rome. Phone of office: (+39) 06 5733 3214. Email paoluzzi@dia.uniroma3.it
Academic activity Alberto Paoluzzi joined the University ”Roma Tre” from its institution on 1992 and the Department of Informatica e Automazione from its foundation on 1996.
Alberto Paoluzzi is a member of the Scientific Committee of the Doctoral School in Engineering at Roma Tre, and is also a member of the Scientific Committee of the Doctoral School in Engineering of Complex Systems. He was member of Committees for tenured university positions, of review committees for final doctoral examinations, reviewer for doctoral theses. He lectured within doctoral schools in Italy and abroad, and was advisor for Ph.D students at both ”La Sapienza” and ”Roma Tre”.
Study periods In 1986–87 he spent a sabbatical year as a visiting scientist with the Robotics Laboratory of Prof. John E. Hopcroft (Turing Award 1987), with the Computer Science Department of Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, USA, making research work on algoriths for solid modeling and Boolean operations, the exact integration of polynomial forms on solid domains and the variational design of shapes.
He was engaged during the period from August to October 2005 with a J. Tinsley Oden Faculty Fellowship with the CVC (Computational Visualization Center) of the ICES (Institute for Computational Engineering and Sciences) of the University of Texas at Austin, USA, collaborating with prof. Chandrajit Bajaj, and starting a novel approach to geometric biomodeling and studying new methods based on bilanced BSP-trees for transformations from boundary triangle representations to solid decompositive representations. This work produced a Best Paper Award in the international conference CAD’06.
In 2006–07 he spent a sabbatical year studying new research topics, including new methods, strongly based on geometric modeling and simulation, for the assessment of security of critical infrastructures. In this period he also continued the collaborative work on the geometric biomodeling of cell organelles during brief visits to the ACIS in Austin and to the University of Wisconsin at Madison. This collaboration started during the hosting of the sabbatical year of Professor Vadim Shapiro at CAD-PLM Lab of Roma Tre in 2000, and produced new algebraic-topological ideas and unification methods for the joint definition of geometric shape and physical behavior, that are giving a novel algebraic unification of shape definition and meshing and numerical simulation (e.g. with finite element methods).
Professional activity Alberto Paoluzzi is a member of the ACM Siggraph (Special Interest Group in Graphics). He is also a member of the Computer Society of IEEE and of the Italian Chapter of Eurographics. He was a member of the Scientific Committee of I.Co.Graphics (Italian Society of Computer Graphics), and associate editor of “Informatica” Journal and of the International Journal of Shape Modeling. He was member of Program Committees of national and international events, including the 2009 Joint SIAM/ACM Conference on Geometric Design and on Solid and Physical Modeling. Alberto Paoluzzi authored or coauthored more than 95 peer-reviewed papers, and published 3 books.
CAD-PLM Laboratory Alberto Paoluzzi manages the research grup and the CAD-PLM laboratory of DIA. The mission of the Computer-Aided Design program was to promote research and resource sharing between people interested in geometric modeling and visual simulation of biomodeling and engineering problems. The research group has concentrated its efforts on the following areas: functional programming with design languages, parallel and distributed processing, geometric and solid modeling, computer-aided design and computer graphics for scientific visualization. A recent point of interest and collaboration with other research groups (ICES, LLNL, Roma Tre) concerns the geometrical and physical modeling of bio-systems.
The new Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) Lab comes from a donation of IBM Corporation to the Department of Informatica and Automazione, following a prestigious IBM SUR Award given in 2003 to Alberto Paoluzzi. The IBM SUR programis designed to promote collaborative research projects and to increase access to, and successful use of, IBM technologies.
The High Performance Computational PLM Lab, integrated with the LAMS (Modeling and Simulation Lab) of Department of Studies on Structures (Prof. Di Carlo), that are promoting the concentration of a pool of resources into a new inter-dipartmental Computational Laboratory, with people and computing nodes from departments of Physics, Mathematics, Biology and Geology, currently contains a cluster of workstations, 3 server SMP and 2 data servers interconnected by Grid software:
Recent research topics Alberto Paoluzzi started working very early in Computer Graphics in the seventies, and introduced the first multidimensional geometric modeling techniques in the eighties. He managed the development of several geometric and solid modelers including the Minerva system on the Macintosh and the IBM PC, the first solid modeler on a personal computer (1985), and the multi-platform and open-source geometric language PLaSM in the nineties.
He coordinates the research group on CAD-PLM at DIA, currently constituted by a professor, two post docs, two junior fellows and 1 Ph.D student in Engineering of complex systems. The group was working on methods and applications concerning the integration of geometry and physics, the parallel geometric languages, the scientific visualization.
In the course of 2005 the group started exploring novel promising research directions in the area of geometric and physical biomodeling, collaborating with the CVC of Prof. Chandrajit Bajaj at ICES (Institute for Computational Engineering and Science) of the University of Texas at Austin. More recently, he started working on the modeling of security of critical infrastructures.
In recent years he is working on the following topics:
Project: Novel Methods for Geometric Bio-Modeling The collaboration on geometric bio-modeling with the CVC (Computational Visualization Center) of the ICES (Institute for Computational Engineering and Sciences) of the University of Texas at Austin started in 2005 with a Tinsley J. Oden Research Felloship to Alberto Paoluzzi. The project is currently producing good results, including the fast generation of adaptive mesh of convex cells from raw boundary triangles produced by segmentation of 3D images, and the design of a new parallel language (PROTOPLASM) for symbolic modeling of biosystems, which can be used for multiscale geometric modeling of cells, tissues and organs, and will support automatic code generation for distributed simulations.
Project: Optimization of video-surveillance placement Alberto Paoluzzi is the principal investigator in a research & development project started on July 2008 with a grant from the Security Branch Service of the “Camera dei Deputati della Repubblica Italiana”.
The joint “Camera-RM3” project has the intention of achieving: (a) optimization tools for the videosurveillance and the security check in the main entrance of the Camera’s building, (b) the optimal placement of surveillance cameras along the perimeters of its seven buildings in the Rome’s city center, and (c) the videosurveillance optimization of the variable paths of temporary art-shows within the interiors of the Camera. The project includes some integration of semi-automatic model reconstruction from both architectural drawings and photographic images.
Project: TRS (Technology & Research for Security) TRS srl is an academic spin-off, with entrepreneurship provided by Theorematica spa and Invent sas. The spin-off project was funded with a grant from Italian Ministry of University and Research (MiUR). On 26 May 2008 the new company was incorporated in the office of the Rector of Roma Tre University. TRS has the mission of developing a software Platform for Intelligent Security of Critical Infrastructures, to assure high levels of awareness and security management of interconnected facilities and infrastructures (government facilities, tunnels, bridges, railways hubs, airports, etc.). TRS develop systems of a new generation, integrating preexisting security with novel capabilities beyond the present state-of-the-art, including: behaviour and situation modelling, counter-measure assessment and evaluation, and security personnel training. Advanced modelling and simulation using virtual-reality interfaces is the reference paradigm.
Founders and shareholders are:
Project: Security modeling of critical infrastructures The project focuses on the development of a prototype of a Platform for Intelligent Security of Critical Infrastructures (I-SEC) to support the modelling, simulation and security management of transport infrastructures (tunnels, bridges, railways hubs, interports, airports, etc) made of physical structures, technological and human resources and operative protocols.
The main objective of the project is to implement a Security Platform which is based on detailed 3D models of the infrastructure, in order to generate the virtual reality scene of controlled spaces and of reference parameters of every structure subset. The virtual representation must integrate reality in normal operation, or even substitute other sources of information, as the video-surveillance, in case of need (smoke, fault of energy, great storm, etc), and provides scene modelling and behavioral simulation engines to be used both in the normal and abnormal operational modes and for education and training purposes.
Project: Knowledge-Based Design Language Supporting Massive Simulations (with IBM Research, Yorktown) The hardware/software infrastructure donated by IBM Corporation is being used for research concerning the representation and handling of design knowledge through a powerful design language, as well as new approaches to the integration of geometric and physics design in a strongly distributed computational environment. A further research direction is being explored concerning the efficient computation of combinatorial coboundary, so allowing for combined design of both model shape and physics, via the integration of the appropriate differential forms on geometric models. A collaboration on this point is being carried on with the Spatial Automation Lab of Univ. of Wisconsin (Prof. Shapiro) and with the Continuum Physics Group of Roma Tre (Prof Di Carlo). It has been shown that combinatorial chains and cochains are useful in describing physical theories in a compact and elegant way, and a strong relation between cochains and the Stokes theorem. A possible integration of combinatorial topology methods with progressive BSP trees constitute the main goal of this research line.
Project: Progressive geometric engine (with LLNL - Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory) A joint research is being developed with Center for Applied Scientific Computing (CASC, LLNL), for the development of a new geometric kernel, that is based on a twin Progressive Binary Space Tree (BSP) and Hasse diagrams for complete representation of topology of multidimensional polyhedral complexes. We introduced here a novel progressive approach to generate a Binary Space Partition (BSP) and convex cell decomposition from any input triangles boundary representation (B-rep), by utilizing a very fast computation of the surface inertia. A solid model is also generated at progressive levels of detail. This approach relies on a simple variation of standard BSP trees, allowing for labeling cells as in, out and fuzzy, and permits a complete representation of a solid mesh as the Hasse diagram of a cell complex. Our new algorithms are embedded in a streamlined computational framework using four types of dataflow processes, that continuously produce, transform, combine or consume subsets of cells depending on the number or their input/output streams. A varied collection of geometric modeling techniques are integrated in this streaming framework, including polygonal, spline, solid and heterogeneous modeling with boundary and decompositive representations, Boolean set operations, Cartesian products and adaptive refinement. This approach is very interesting, since a monolithic geometric kernel is substituted by a set of pipelined distributed processes, producing further and further detailed representation of a geometric object, depending on the available resources (time, processors, memory, bandwidth).
Project: VisualPlasm In this research we have introduced a visual approach to functional programming with Plasm, a design language used for geometric modeling and the generation of virtual environments. A visual diagram is generated according to very few simple rules, and may be used both for automatically generating the corresponding Plasm code and for the specification and distribution of computer tasks to be concurrently run in a multithread environment, either single or multi-host. The visual diagram may be used as a tool to make the code debugging easier and interactive, since it allows for inspecting each value in the functional environment with a single point-and-click interaction paradigm, as well as a user-interface to powerful generative VR environments.