 Chief Technology Officer Synthicity Berkeley, California Email:  |
Short Bio
Carlos Vanegas is the Chief Technology Officer and a co-founder at Synthicity, where he leads the engineering team in the development of software tools for 3D urban planning and design, including UrbanCanvas and GeoCanvas. He was a Postdoctoral Scholar at the University of California, Berkeley, and received his PhD from the Department of Computer Science at Purdue University in 2012. His work is focused on concurrent behavioral and geometric methods for fast design, editing and visualization of 3D urban spaces. Carlos has published several peer reviewed papers in top computer graphics journals and conferences and has held numerous invited talks at conferences and universities.
During his doctoral studies, Carlos was a Research Assistant at Purdue's Computer Graphics and Visualization Lab, a visiting researcher at the Chair for Information Architecture at ETH Zürich, and a collaborator in several research projects with the Department of City and Regional Planning at UC Berkeley. He also was an intern software engineer at Procedural Inc. (acquired by Esri in 2011), where he participated in the development of CityEngine. Carlos obtained his B.S. degree in Applied Mathematics from EAFIT University (Colombia) in 2007. Academic Research
My research is focused on procedural methods for fast design and editing of 3D urban models. Modeling the appearance and behavior of urban spaces is a great challenge for computer graphics and urban simulation, due to the size and detail of urban structures, and the complex socioeconomic rules that determine the evolution of a city. These two disciplines have traditionally worked in isolation, in spite of the many applications to which they are both relevant, including urban planning, emergency response, mapping, visualization, and entertainment.
The goal of my PhD dissertation was to show that a concurrent behavioral and geometrical simulation significantly benefits the design, editing, and prediction of large-scale 3D urban models by (i) inferring the values for multiple parameters and decision choices which in turn reduces design time, (ii) enforcing the 3D generation process to produce models that behaviorally and geometrically resemble plausible real-world cities, and (iii) augmenting the simulation to consider changes in the urban landscape geometry resulting in improved simulation accuracy over long time horizons and in more simulated urban phenomena. Part of my work as a member of the Synthicity team is to incorporate these ideas into novel software tools that are currently being adopted by city and regional planners, urban designers and architects all over the world. Selected Publications
Carlos A. Vanegas, Ignacio Garcia-Dorado, Daniel Aliaga, Bedrich Benes, Paul Waddell, “Inverse Design of Urban Procedural Models”, ACM Transactions on Graphics (also in Proceedings SIGGRAPH Asia), 31(6), 2012
Carlos A. Vanegas, Daniel G. Aliaga, Bedrich Benes, "Building Reconstruction using Manhattan-World Grammars", IEEE Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2010 Carlos A. Vanegas, Daniel G. Aliaga, Bedrich Benes, Paul Waddell, “Interactive Design of Urban Spaces using Geometrical and Behavioral Modeling”, ACM Transactions on Graphics (also in Proceedings SIGGRAPH Asia), 28(5), 2009 |
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