Postdoctoral Scholar
University of California, Berkeley

Email:

Carlos Vanegas is a Postdoctoral Scholar at the University of California, Berkeley, working under the mentorship of Prof. Paul Waddell. He received his PhD from the Department of Computer Science at Purdue University (USA) in 2012. His research is focused on concurrent behavioral and geometric methods for fast design, editing and visualization of 3D urban spaces. He has published 16 peer reviewed papers, 11 of them in urban modeling. During his doctoral studies, Carlos was a Research Assistant at Purdue's Computer Graphics and Visualization Lab under supervision of Prof. Daniel Aliaga, an academic guest at the Chair for Information Architecture at ETH Zürich, an intern software engineer at ESRI Procedural Inc (Switzerland), and a collaborator in several research projects with the Department of City and Regional Planning at UC Berkeley (USA). Carlos obtained his B.S. degree in Applied Mathematics from EAFIT University (Colombia) in 2007.

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.

My goal is 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.

Carlos A. Vanegas, Tom Kelly, Basil Weber, Jan Halatsch, Daniel Aliaga, Pascal Müller, "Procedural Generation of Parcels in Urban Modeling", Computer Graphics Forum (Proceedings Eurographics), 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

I was born and raised in Medellín, Colombia. This has defined my life goals and ideas more than I ever expected, as a result of my deep, conflicting admiration and aversion towards many customs and values of my country. I have a significant interest in understanding the sociopolitical events taking place around the world, and attempt to be severe to myself when it comes to social and environmental awareness. I love traveling and visiting new countries, and have been fascinated by Geography and Foreign Languages during most of my life. I have also played classical piano since I was a child, and this is by far the most effective way for me to briefly escape from everything else.

+ Mar 2012: PhD final examination passed. Nominated to "outstanding dissertation award". Manuscript and slides available here.

+ Jan 2012: Paper accepted to TVCG 

+ Dec 2011: Paper accepted to Eurographics 2012

+ Aug 2011: The slides of our SIGGRAPH 2011 course on Urban Modeling are now available here

2012 
+ May 15-18:
Eurographics, Cagliari, Italy

2011
+ Nov 28-30:
Open Source Planning Tools Symposium, Salt Lake City, USA

+ Oct 14-16:
Bogota ACM SIGGRAPH Event

+ Aug 7-11:
SIGGRAPH, Vancouver, Canada

2010
+ Jul 24-30:
SIGGRAPH, Los Angeles, USA

+ Jun 19-29:
Workshop on WC2014 Urban Scenarios, Porto Alegre, Brazil

+ Jun 13-18:
CVPR, San Francisco, USA

+ Feb 24-Jul 24:
Research internship at ETH Zürich and Procedural Inc., Switzerland