iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Tzu-Mao Li @tzumaoli.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

Recommended weekend reading. "The end of Computing Science?", Dijkstra, Nov 2000 www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/transcr...

cs.utexas.edu

E.W. Dijkstra Archive: The end of Computing Science? (EWD1304)

Tzu-Mao Li @tzumaoli.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

cseweb.ucsd.edu/~tzli/ Just renovated my website! Completely manually written HTML (though ChatGPT was used for a little bit of internet archaeology and brainstorming : p). Took me about 5-6 hours. Super fun. ^.^

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Nicholas Sharp @nmwsharp.bsky.social · 05/08/2026

Tomorrow I'll speak at the FPTalks series on floating point and numerical analysis, about robust geometry for neural implicit surfaces (work w/ @_AlecJacobson). The other talks sound amazing, and I love this area! Check out this great organization. fptalks.org/talks/fptalk...

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Tzu-Mao Li @tzumaoli.bsky.social · 02/08/2026

My two advices/suggestions to both juniors and seniors: be weird and be curious.

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Clément Canonne @ccanonne.github.io · 01/08/2026

"We're all worried," as what it means to do research (in my field, Theoretical CS) seems to be shifting, and shifting fast. What to do? Senior researchers must lead by example, knowing that not everything will pan out. What I'm suggesting below may not work everywhere, but here's my own advice: 1/

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Tzu-Mao Li @tzumaoli.bsky.social · 20/07/2026

Hopefully one last SIGGRAPH advertisement. I, myself, yours truly, will present on Haolin's behalf a data-driven method for joint adaptive sampling and quadrature for integration. Wed R408A. In the end of the talk I'll argue why everyone is doing the wrong thing. Paper: suikasibyl.github.io/nqr

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Tzu-Mao Li @tzumaoli.bsky.social · 19/07/2026

More SIGGRAPH advertisements: my student Trevor will talk about his work on making ReSTIR significantly more efficient for rendering caustics. The talk is on Wednesday 9:20am at the ReSTIR session (Room 408A). Also check out the paper if you're interested! cwyman.org/papers/tog25...

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Tzu-Mao Li @tzumaoli.bsky.social · 17/07/2026

For people coming to SIGGRAPH next week: Xuan will present this paper on Thursday 9:50am in the "Prevent Collision" session in Room 403A. Come chat with us!

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Tzu-Mao Li @tzumaoli.bsky.social · 17/07/2026

People who're coming to SIGGRAPH next week: this paper will be presented by Venkat next Tuesday at 9:50am in the "Layout & Procedural" session at room 403A (I don't know why they put us in this session =.=). Please come and chat with us!

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Ahmed Mahmoud @ahdhn.bsky.social · 14/07/2026

Next week at #SIGGRAPH 2026, we'll present "Locality-Aware Automatic Differentiation on the GPU for Mesh-Based Computations," with Rahul Goel, Jonathan Ragan-Kelley, and @justinmsolomon.bsky.social . Talk: Mon., July 20, 2:50 PM, Room 403-B Paper: dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/... More below (1/7):

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Rohan Sawhney @rohansawhney.bsky.social · 09/06/2026

Releasing Walk on Spheres Extensions (WoSX): a GPU-accelerated C++/Python library for Monte Carlo physics simulation on complex geometry. Think path tracing but for physics beyond light transport: heat, electrostatics, potential flow, deformation & more! github.com/nv-tlabs/wosx

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Tzu-Mao Li @tzumaoli.bsky.social · 10/06/2026

cseweb.ucsd.edu/~tzli/cool_r... I started to maintain a list of homepages of graphics academics who I think did cool work, are younger than me, and are not my current/past students. It's a living list so if I read any cool papers I'll add the authors to the list. I encourage you to do the same!

cseweb.ucsd.edu

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Tzu-Mao Li @tzumaoli.bsky.social · 03/06/2026

cseweb.ucsd.edu/~tzli/abstra... Check out the slides of my recent internal talk about abstraction in CS research. Apart from some propaganda of our recent works, the key message is that "abstraction doesn’t, and shouldn’t replace friction" (a corollary of Spolsky's "law of leaky abstraction").

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Tzu-Mao Li @tzumaoli.bsky.social · 25/05/2026

github.com/txstc55/yasps Check out Xuan's work on a new programming language for writing modular and high-performance physical simulation code from energy definition. The key is two differentiable relational operators (join/union) that model the sparsity structure between the attributes and energy.

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Victor Zhong @vzhong.bsky.social · 23/05/2026

I helping recalibrate Waterloo’s software engineering program (and to some degree CS) for the age of AI. I wrote an essay on the challenges I’m seeing. www.victorzhong.com/writing/the-...

victorzhong.com

The Homogenization of Computer Science - Victor Zhong

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Tzu-Mao Li @tzumaoli.bsky.social · 17/05/2026

iveevi.github.io/rcgp/ Check out Venkat's work on a new graphics programming language on statically enforcing correctness of heterogeneous graphics programs (e.g., resources declared on host must match shaders at compile time). The compiler is open sourced and let us know if you have any comment!

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josh (with paranormalities) @joshwithparenthes.es · 10/05/2026

Out now: AI and the Murder of Truth. And Air Bud. On AI, education, fascism, paying the Dane-geld, and why there ain’t no rule says a dog can’t play basketball. The follow up to last year’s “You are a better writer than AI.” If you liked that video, this is worth your time. youtu.be/sETvPBVKBAY

youtu.be

AI and the Murder of Truth. And Air Bud.

YouTube video by josh (with parentheses)

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Tzu-Mao Li @tzumaoli.bsky.social · 04/05/2026

For people who are attending Eurographics in the coming week: my student Trevor will talk about his latest work on making ReSTIR efficient when reusing from a large number of neighbors. The key is an unbiased estimation of the MIS weight. See the paper below. research.nvidia.com/labs/rtr/pub...

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Tzu-Mao Li @tzumaoli.bsky.social · 19/03/2026

"...it would be as though our brain, which constitutes the physical, material condition of our thoughts, were unable to follow what we do, so that from now on we would indeed need artificial machines to do our thinking and speaking." Hannah Arendt, 'The Human Condition', 1958.

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Tzu-Mao Li @tzumaoli.bsky.social · 09/03/2026

EGSR 2026's call for papers is out: egsr2026.inria.fr/call-for-pap...

egsr2026.inria.fr

Call for papers – EGSR 2026

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Tzu-Mao Li @tzumaoli.bsky.social · 03/02/2026

I have procrastinated on writing so much that I wrote an entire document on writing tips: cseweb.ucsd.edu/~tzli/writin... Probably not much is new but I find I still need to repeat the same things to my students regularly. Will update this document over time hopefully.

cseweb.ucsd.edu

Writing tips

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Tzu-Mao Li @tzumaoli.bsky.social · 31/01/2026

"AI has transformed programming forever", but what does that even mean? I mean, Sublime Text has transformed the way I and many programmed forever since it came out (with much less cost), but I don't see the same amount of excitement around it. Sorry, have to rant, back to writing proposals. : (

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Tzu-Mao Li @tzumaoli.bsky.social · 09/01/2026

cseweb.ucsd.edu/~tzli/novelt... I gave an internal talk at UCSD last year regarding "novelty" in computer science research. In it I "debunked" some of the myth people seem to have about what is good research in computer science these days. People seemed to like it, so I thought I should share.

cseweb.ucsd.edu

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Tzu-Mao Li @tzumaoli.bsky.social · 15/12/2025

Check out our recent SIGGRAPH Asia paper on differentiating programs that integrates over discontinuous functions (yes, again), which got the best paper award! yashbelhe.github.io/asd/index.html The first author Yash is looking for a job yashbelhe.github.io so talk to us if you're interested.

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Tzu-Mao Li @tzumaoli.bsky.social · 30/10/2025

I gave a talk at Pacific Graphics 2025 on the topic of "Classical Computer Graphics in the Age of Generative AI". I've uploaded the recording to Youtube today. www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vyci...

youtube.com

"Classical Computer Graphics in the Age of Generative AI", Pacific Graphics 2025 Keynote, Tzu-Mao Li

YouTube video by Tzu-Mao Li

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Bing Xu @bingxxu.bsky.social · 23/10/2025

🎄 Introducing our paper A Generalizable Light Transport 3D Embedding for Global Illumination lnkd.in/gQUMSAyV . 🙈 Just as Transformers learn long-range relationships between words or pixels, our new paper shows they can also learn how light interacts and bounces around a 3D scene.

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Academy Software Foundation (ASWF) @aswf.io · 07/10/2025

Today we're unveiling our newest project: OpenQMC! Developed & contributed to the Foundation by @framestore.bsky.social, OpenQMC aims to improve the fidelity & efficiency of rendering photoreal moving images for film, TV, gaming & advertising. Read more on our blog: www.aswf.io/blog/openqmc...

aswf.io

OpenQMC Becomes an Academy Software Foundation Project - ASWF

Developed by Framestore, OpenQMC has improved the fidelity and speed of rendering Hollywood blockbusters such as Barbie, Superman, Wicked, F1 the Movie and How to Train Your Dragon LOS ANGELES, CA, Oc...

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Tzu-Mao Li @tzumaoli.bsky.social · 15/09/2025

Anything outside of Nyquist-Shannon limit is "hallucination". It used to have cooler names aliasing/noise. I think the key difference between the two is that human are good at catching aliasing/noise (even anti-aliasing), but not good at noticing hallucination. So "hallucination" feels like cheating

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Wenzel Jakob @wjakob.bsky.social · 08/08/2025

My lab will be recruiting at all levels. PhD students, postdocs, and a research engineering position (worldwide for PhD/postdoc, EU candidates only for the engineering position). If you're at SIGGRAPH, I'd love to talk to you if you are interested in any of these.

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Kostas Anagnostou @kostasanagnostou.bsky.social · 13/07/2025

"Hallucinations on the future of real-time rendering", High Performance Graphics 2025 keynote: c0de517e.com/023_hpg.htm

c0de517e.com

Hallucinations on the future of real-time rendering.

Angelo Pesce's homepage & blog on computers, graphics and other things.

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Tzu-Mao Li @tzumaoli.bsky.social · 14/06/2025

Rendering nerds! Check out our latest work "Vector-Valued Monte Carlo Integration Using Ratio Control Variates" that has just gotten the best paper award at SIGGRAPH 2025. This paper presents a method that reduces variance of a wide range of rendering and diff. rendering tasks with negligible cost.

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JCGT announcements @handle.invalid · 16/05/2025

An update, a bit of retrospection, and a call for you, yes, you, to help JCGT a bit: www.realtimerendering.com/blog/jcgt-is...

realtimerendering.com

JCGT is moving along | Real-Time Rendering

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Tzu-Mao Li @tzumaoli.bsky.social · 29/03/2025

zeamoxwang.github.io/HotSpot-CVPR... My student Zimo/Cheng's recent work tackles this problem! A lot of recent neural "SDF" optimizers use losses that, even when perfectly minimized, still don't result in actual signed distance fields. Our loss guarantees convergence to distance when minimized.

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Justin Solomon @justinmsolomon.bsky.social · 06/01/2025

Announcing SGI 2025! Undergrads and MS students: Apply for 6 weeks of paid summer geometry processing research. No experience needed: 1 week tutorials + 5 weeks of projects. Mentors are top researchers in this emerging branch of graphics/computing/math. sgi.mit.edu

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Freya Holmér @freya.bsky.social · 02/01/2025

live in about 10 hours from now - subscribe/mark your calendars/tell your friends/share etc. c: Generative AI is a Parasitic Cancer www.youtube.com/watch?v=-opB...

youtube.com

Generative AI is a Parasitic Cancer

YouTube video by Freya Holmér

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Slang Shading Language and Compiler @shader-slang.bsky.social · 20/12/2024

Shannon Woods from NVIDIA gave a great presentation on Slang at SIGGRAPH Asia. The slides and video are available on the event page: www.khronos.org/events/siggr...

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Vinod Grover @vinodg.bsky.social · 16/12/2024

AI Compiler research intern positions at NVIDIA (Seattle). Functional programming, polyhedral compilation, program synthesis, compiler optimization. Send resume to compiler-jobs@Nvidia.com

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Maximilian Tarpini @maxtarpini.bsky.social · 21/11/2024

I'm keeping updated this super comprehensive collection of <Light Transport> papers (by tech and by year), from the Kajiya eq to latest differential and neural approaches, passing by RRT and MC theories | As before, repost if you think it may be useful to others. drive.google.com/drive/folder...

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Silvia Sellán @silviasellan.bsky.social · 10/12/2024

SGP 2025 will take place in Bilbao between June 30th and July 4th, and I am one of the Technical Program Co-Chairs. For the first time, we are introducing an *early* paper deadline on **February 7th**!

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Alex Lew @alexlew.bsky.social · 08/12/2024

If you're interested in a PhD at the intersection of machine learning and programming languages, consider applying to Yale CS! We're exploring new approaches to building software that draws inferences and makes predictions. See alexlew.net for details & apply at gsas.yale.edu/admissions/ by Dec. 15

Probabilistic and differentiable programming at Yale — fully funded PhD positions starting Fall 2025! Apply by Dec. 15.

Do a PhD at the rich intersection of programming languages and machine learning.

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Tzu-Mao Li @tzumaoli.bsky.social · 05/12/2024

cseweb.ucsd.edu/~tzli/Score_... I wrote down some random notes about the connection between score matching (aka diffusion models) and Stein's unbiased risk estimate (SURE). It shows why optimal denoising lead to optimal score. Not a new observation but doesn't seem to be talked enough in literature.

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Tzu-Mao Li @tzumaoli.bsky.social · 03/12/2024

Academics! Any tips for increasing class attendance/engagement apart from "gamifying" the participation (i.e., grading the participation)? My lecture attendance has been dropping (even though I personally think my lectures are okay), and it kind of hurt my motivation, so any advice is helpful.

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Slang Shading Language and Compiler @shader-slang.bsky.social · 03/12/2024

Come catch our BOF at SIGGRAPH Asia today! Learn more about the open source Slang initiative from NVIDIA that is now a part of the Khronos Group family! Learn more: www.khronos.org/events/siggr... #slang #shading #language #compiler

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Kartik Chandra @kartikchandra.bsky.social · 30/11/2024

Graphics has long studied how to make: (1) realistic images 📷 (2) non-photorealistic images ✍️ (3) realistic sounds 🎤 What about (4) "non-phono-realistic" sounds? What could that even mean? Next week at SIGGRAPH Asia, MIT undergrad Matt Caren will present our proposal… 🧵 arxiv.org/abs/2409.13507

A screenshot of the first page of the paper.

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Jon Barron @jonbarron.bsky.social · 25/11/2024

Our group at Google DeepMind is now accepting intern applications for summer 2025. Attached is the official "call for interns" email; the links and email aliases that got lost in the screenshot are below.

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Mark Pauly @markpauly.bsky.social · 25/11/2024

Please share: Our lab is looking for new PhD students starting 2025! If you are interested in research in geometry, computational design and digital fabrication, join us at EPFL! More info on the lab: epfl.ch/labs/gcm/ More info on how to apply: www.epfl.ch/education/ph...

epfl.ch

Geometric Computing Laboratory

Our research aims at empowering creators. We develop efficient simulation and optimization algorithms to build computational design methodologies for advanced material systems and digital fabrication ...

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Wenzel Jakob @wjakob.bsky.social · 22/11/2024

My team RGL is looking for new PhD students starting 2025. If you are excited about topics like inverse rendering, compilers for graphics, and physically based modeling then please join us at EPFL. Info about the lab & admission process: rgl.epfl.ch/pages/jobs (Deadline: Dec 15)

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Bart Wronski 🇺🇦🇵🇸 @bartwr.bsky.social · 21/11/2024

Khronos will oversee the open-source Slang shading language and compiler www.khronos.org/news/press/k... This is big. Slang is cross-platform, backward-compatible, and trivial to port to. It supports differentiation/gradient computation as the first-class citizen, allowing to merge ML and graphics.

khronos.org

Khronos Group Launches Slang Initiative, Hosting Open Source Compiler Contributed by NVIDIA

The Khronos Group has announced the launch of the new Slang™…

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