Dan Andrei Calian

I am a second year EngD student in Computer Graphics at University College London. I am supervised by Prof. Jan Kautz (UCL) and Dr. Kenny Mitchell (Disney Research Zurich).

Previously, I completed my undergraduate degree in Computer Science with AI at the University of Nottingham, graduating first in my year.

I am mostly interested in global illumination rendering methods and their application to augmented reality. Recently I did a short internship at Disney Research in Edinburgh, under Dr. Kenny Mitchell's guidance. In my first year I worked on Underwater Rendering in Augmented Reality. The project's goal was to render objects with approximate global illumination in real-time while virtually inserting them under water surfaces in live video footage - all in an AR environment.

I have also worked on the Automatic Joint Modelling for Printing Articulated Models group project. We looked at embedding functional joints in 3D models such that they can be 3D printed without requiring any assembly, with our paper being accepted at SIGGRAPH Asia 2012.

Previously, as part of a 2nd year undergraduate research internship and my final year dissertation, I have worked on developing, integrating and analysing the performance of memetic algorithms for the BioHEL evolutionary learning system, while being supervised by Dr. Jaume Bacardit (University of Notingham). Our resulting paper is currently under rebuttal.

I usually spend my free time by developing PC/Android games. Previously, I have developed a Rubik's cube game, a Backgammon game complete with AI, a reverse space invader game, a "circling rabbit" game, etc. These games, and some other potentially useful small pieces of software, are still available at my old website. Currently, I am trying to find spare time to dedicate on drag a dragon which will, eventually, be released for the Android platform.