Research Assistant Professor of Computer Science
Ph.D., Cornell, 1994
Professor Smits has been working in the areas of global illumination, ray
tracing, and terrain rendering. His work in global illumination has
been directed towards making radiosity effective in complex
environments through a process of bounding errors in the
computations. Recently he has been investigating the synthesis of
Monte Carlo techniques with finite element methods for global
illumination. In the area of ray tracing, he has done some work with
interactive ray tracing on large, shared memory, systems. He has
also looked at lower-level efficiency issues for reducing the cost of
ray tracing. He is currently looking at automatic generation of
improved acceleration hierarchies for ray tracing. His work in
terrain rendering has been directed towards improving the models of
atmospheric effects and day light for faster, more accurate,
renderings of outdoor environments.
