Harald Schmidl's home page

I'm an ex grad student in computer science from the Computer Science department at UM. I got the Ph.D. in May 2002 and the M.S. degree from the same department in May 1996. Way back then, I did my undergraduate in Physics at the Universität Regensburg and the Eberhard-Karls Universität Tübingen in Germany. My next stop will be at the University of North Carolina's GAMMA group for a postdoc.

I have been working on algorithms for rigid body simulation together with professor Victor Milenkovic at UM's CS department. We were developing optimization-based algorithms that allow realistic simulation of systems with many bodies in a "crowded" arrangement, such as stacks. You can follow the links under "research ongoing" to see some results. This work was published as a paper at SIGGRAPH 2001 and got covered in the Tech Watch section of Computer Graphics World 12/01.

Personal info:

• Academic style CV in pdf.

Interests:

• Computer graphics, computational geometry, simulation, animation.
• AI, neural nets.
• Programming languages and their compilers.
• Experimental hands-on programming work.
• Applications of computers in foreign areas, such as music, visual arts, or psychology.

• Some old little java applets on simulating solids. These are some of my very first experiments, and therefore probably not the most interesting!
• Some newer, and much more interesting results are here.
• Click for SIGGRAPH 2001.

Papers:

• Harald Schmidl and Victor J. Milenkovic, "A Fast Impulsive Contact Suite for Rigid Body Simulation", submitted to TOG, December 2001.
• Victor J. Milenkovic and Harald Schmidl, "Optimization-Based Animation", SIGGRAPH 2001, ps or pdf.
• Harald Schmidl and Dilip Sarkar, "A Neural Net for Chord Classification", Proceedings of SPIE 1998, pdf abstract.

Theses:

• Harald Schmidl, "Optimization-Based Animation", Ph.D. thesis, pdf.
• Harald Schmidl, "Movement Detection in Video Data and its Translation into MIDI Signals", Masters thesis, pdf abstract.

Some miscellaneous things:

• A paper on the German ciphering machine Enigma (class project for "Cryptography").
• Some image processing experiments in Matlab (class project for "Machine Vision").

Mailing address:

All items sent through US mail:

Department of Computer Science
Ungar
P.O. Box 248154
Coral Gables, FL 33124-4245

Ungar-Room 429
1365 Memorial Drive
Coral Gables, FL 33146-4245

(305) 284-4189 phone
(305) 284-2264 fax