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Kari Pulli

Research Fellow Visual Computing and User Interfaces team leader

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Background

My academic and professional life has mostly dealt with computer graphics and computer vision. For my M.Sc. thesis I implemented a parallel graphics system on Transputers while visiting University of Paderborn, Germany in 1990-91. I worked as a researcher at University of Oulu, Finland on range vision in 1991-93. My PhD at University of Washington (1993-97) was a mixture of graphics and range vision (surface reconstruction and rendering with Tony DeRose and Linda Shapiro and many others), and during that time I had graphics internships at Microsoft, SGI, Alias|Wavefront. I worked as the technical head of the Digital Michelangelo project for Stanford in Palo Alto, Florence, Rome in 1998-99. I joined Nokia 1999, have been leading lots of graphics research there, and worked on graphics APIs such as OpenGL ES, M3G, and OpenVG for mobile devices. From June 2004 to August 2006 I was a visiting scientist at MIT CSAIL Computer Graphics Group, then I moved the Palo Alto.

Professional Activities

I am a Research Fellow at Nokia, I head the Visual Computing and User Interfaces research team at NRC Palo Alto.

I am also a docent at the University of Oulu.

Committees

Eurographics Executive Committee
Standardization work (Khronos: OpenGL ES, OpenVG; JCP: M3G Mobile 3D Graphics [JSR-184, JSR-297])
Program/papers committees: RISA 2000, Mobile and Ubiquitous Multimedia (MUM) 2002 - 2007, Web3D 2003 & 2004, PSIPS 2004, Int. Symp. on Multimedia (ISM) 2005, Int. Symp. on Mixed and Augmented Reality (ISMAR) 2005 - 2007, Eurographics 2005, Multimedia on Mobile Devices (SPIE) 2006 - 2008, 3DPVT 2006, Symp. on Interactive 3D Graphics and Games 2008.

Publications

Robert Y. Wang, Kari Pulli, Jovan Popović: Real-Time Enveloping with Rotational Regression
SIGGRAPH 2007, San Diego, USA, August 2007.
Kari Pulli, Jani Vaarala, Ville Miettinen, Robert Simpson, Tomi Aarnio, Mark Callow: The Mobile 3D Ecosystem
Course 25 at SIGGRAPH 2007, San Diego, USA, August 2007.
Kari Pulli, Jani Vaarala, Ville Miettinen, Tomi Aarnio, Mark Callow: Developing Mobile 3D Applications with OpenGL ES and M3G
Course T3 at Eurographics 2006, Vienna, Austria, September 2006.
Kari Pulli: New APIs for Mobile Graphics
SPIE Electronic Imaging 2006 Multimedia on Mobile Devices II, San Jose, USA, 2006.
Albert Huang, Kari Pulli, Larry Rudolph: Kimono: Kiosk-Mobile Phone Knowledge Sharing System
MUM 2005, Christchurch, New Zealand, December 2005.
Kari Pulli, Tomi Aarnio, Kimmo Roimela, Jani Vaarala: Designing Graphics Programming Interfaces for Mobile Devices.
IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications, Volume 25, Issue 8, Nov.-Dec. 2005.
Kari J. Kangas, Mika Qvist, Kari Pulli: Synthetic content approach for benchmarking mobile 3D graphics
SIGRAD 2005, Lund, Sweden, November 2005.
Eugene Hsu, Kari Pulli, Jovan Popovic: Style Translation for Human Motion
SIGGRAPH 2005, Los Angeles, USA, August 2005.
Jiawen Chen, Michael I. Gordon, William Thies, Matthias Zwicker, Kari Pulli, Frédo Durand: A Reconfigurable Architecture for Load-Balanced Rendering ( slides )
Graphics Hardware 2005, Los Angeles, USA, July 2005.
Kari Pulli, Simo Piiroinen, Tom Duchamp, Werner Stuetzle: Projective Surface Matching of Colored 3D Scans ( slides, slides with speaker notes )
Fifth International Conference on3-D Digital Imaging and Modeling (3DIM'05), Ottawa, Canada, June 2005.
Kari Pulli: From a Researcher to a Manager: Transition and Learning Strategies
Executive MBA thesis, University of Oulu, Finland, 2001.
Marc Levoy, Kari Pulli, Brian Curless, Szymon Rusinkiewicz, David Koller, Lucas Pereira, Matt Ginzton, Sean Anderson, James Davis, Jeremy Ginsberg, Jonathan Shade, Duane Fulk: The Digital Michelangelo Project: 3D Scanning of Large Statues
SIGGRAPH 2000, New Orleans, USA, July 2000.
Kari Pulli, Linda Shapiro: Surface Reconstruction and Display from Range and Color Data
Graphical Models and Image Processing, 62, pp. 165-201, 2000.
Basically a condensed version of the dissertation.
Kari Pulli: Multiview Registration for Large Data Sets
Second International Conference on 3D Digital Imaging and Modeling (3DIM'99), pp. 160-168, Ottawa, Canada, October 1999.
Kari Pulli, Habib Abi-Rached, Tom Duchamp, Linda G. Shapiro, and Werner Stuetzle: Acquisition and Visualization of Colored 3D Objects
International Conference on Pattern Recognition (ICPR), pp. 11-15, Brisbane, Australia, August 1998.
Kari Pulli: Surface Reconstruction and Display from Range and Color Data
Ph.D. dissertation, University of Washington, 1997.
Kari Pulli, Michael Cohen, Tom Duchamp, Hugues Hoppe, John McDonald, Linda Shapiro, and Werner Stuetzle: Surface Modeling and Display from Range and Color Data
Keynote address at ICIAP'97, Lecture Notes in Computer Science 1310, Springer-Verlag , pp. 385-397, Florence, Italy, September 1997
Kari Pulli, Michael Cohen, Tom Duchamp, Hugues Hoppe, Linda Shapiro, and Werner Stuetzle: View-based Rendering: Visualizing Real Objects from Scanned Range and Color Data
8th Eurographics Workshop on Rendering, St. Etienne, France, June 1997
also Technical Report UW-CSE-97-04-01, University of Washington
Kari Pulli, Tom Duchamp, Hugues Hoppe, John McDonald, Linda Shapiro, and Werner Stuetzle: Robust Meshes from Range Maps
Int. Conf. on Recent Advances in 3-D Digital Imaging and Modeling (3DIM'97), pp. 205-211, Ottawa, Canada, May 1997
Kari Pulli and Michael Lounsbery: Hierarchical editing of subdivision surfaces
Technical Report UW-CSE-97-04-07, University of Washington
Kari Pulli and Mark Segal: Fast rendering of subdivision surfaces
7th Eurographics Workshop on Rendering, pp. 61-70, 282, Porto, Portugal, June 1996
(Published by SpringerComputerScience as "Rendering Techniques '96")
also Technical Report UW-CSE-96-03-02, University of Washington
also Technical Sketch in SIGGRAPH '96 Visual Proceedings
Kari Pulli and Tony DeRose: Effective Removal of Detail for a Multiresolution Viewer
a Technical Sketch in SIGGRAPH '96 Visual Proceedings
Kari Pulli and Linda Shapiro: Triplet-Based Object Recognition Using Synthetic and Real Probability Models
International Conference on Pattern Recognition (ICPR), Wien, Austria, August 1996
a longer version is in
Kari Pulli
TRIBORS: A Triplet-Based Object Recognition System
Technical Report UW-CSE-95-01-01, University of Washington
Hubert Jin, Tom Duchamp, Hugues Hoppe, John McDonald, Kari Pulli, and Werner Stuetzle: Surface reconstruction from misregistered data
SPIE vol. 2573, pp. 324-8, 1995.
Kari Pulli: Vision Methods for an Autonomous Machine Based on Range Imaging
Licentiate thesis, ACTA Universitatis Ouluensis, C 72, 1993.
Kari Pulli and Matti Pietikäinen: Range Image Segmentation Based on Decomposition of Surface Normals
Scandinavian Conference on Image Analysis (SCIA), Norway, 1993.
Jukka Riekki, Kari Pulli, and Juha Röning: A Goal Oriented and Reactive Autonomous Machine
Finnish Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 1992.
Kari Pulli: 3D Graphics on the Multiprocessor System DAMP
Diploma thesis, University of Oulu and University of Paderborn, 1991.

Presentations

Web3D 2007 - Keynote presentation: "Mobile Visual I/O" Slides (pdf)[6MB]
Abstract: Mobile devices are the new frontier in computation, internet connectivity, imaging, and computer graphics. For many people it provides their first computer of any kind. For example in China there are about 100 million PCs but over 400 million mobile phones. And the sales of camera phones far surpass the number of digital or any other types of consumer cameras. The visual capabilities of these devices have progressed at amazing pace, and today the high-end smart phones have large color screens, fast CPUs, even dedicated graphics HW acceleration. We will cover the short history of mobile 3D graphics, and introduce recent mobile graphics standards such as OpenGL ES, M3G, and OpenVG; these provide visual output. In recent years photography and graphics have begun to move closer to each other, we will also briefly discuss computational and contextual photography and augmented reality as fertile research topics; these provide visual input.
SPIE Conference on Multimedia on Mobile Devices II - Keynote presentation: "New APIs for Mobile Graphics" Slides (pdf)[9MB]
Abstract: Progress in mobile graphics technology during the last five years has been swift, and it has followed a similar path as on PCs: early proprietary software engines running on integer hardware paved the way to standards that provide a roadmap for graphics hardware acceleration. In this overview we cover five recent standards for 3D and 2D vector graphics for mobile devices. OpenGL ES is a low-level API for 3D graphics, meant for applications written in C or C++. M3G (JSR 184) is a high-level 3D API for mobile Java that can be implemented on top of OpenGL ES. Collada is a content interchange format and API that allows combining digital content creation tools and exporting the results to different run-time systems, including OpenGL ES and M3G. Two new 2D vector graphics APIs reflect the relations of OpenGL ES and M3G: OpenVG is a low-level API for C/C++ that can be used as a building block for a high-level mobile Java API JSR 226.
Point-Based Graphics 2005 - Keynote presentation: "Ubiquitous 3D" Slides (pdf)[7.6MB]
Abstract: A decade ago 3D graphics moved from dedicated and expensive engineering graphics workstations to normal PCs. Sophisticated graphics was now accessible to a much larger audience and developer pool than before. A similar revolution is happening right now as mobile devices such as PDAs and cellular phones have their own standard 3D APIs, high-quality color displays, and even hardware acceleration is starting to become available.
This talk covered the graphics capabilities of modern mobile devices, their limitations, and graphics APIs designed for these devices. Also discussed, what is unique with mobile graphics compared to desktop graphics.
Graphics Hardware 2004 - Keynote presentation: "Graphics Everywhere - Pixels in your Pocket" Slides (pdf)[6.3MB]
Abstract: Mobile phones have been relatively simple appliances optimized for single use case: making and receiving phone calls. However, recent technological advances have produced mobile communication and information appliances, with decent general computational capacity, increasingly larger and higher quality displays, built-in wireless communication, open development platforms, and ubiquitous presence. This talk is going to cover the implications of these developments from the graphics point of view, the graphics use cases, mobile graphics standards, some limitations of the technology, software and hardware graphics engines, and the fast evolution of mobile graphics.
Participated on Panels on Mobile Graphics at SIGGRAPH 2002, Web3D 2003, Imagina 2004, Computer Graphics International 2005.
Other conference presentations (without a paper):
- JavaOne 2004 (JSR-184, Mobile 3D Graphics for Java MIDP),
- Assembly 2003 (Mobile Graphics APIs),
- JavaOne 2003
- MUM 2002 (Mobile Graphics),
- Eurographics Italian Chapter Annual meeting 2002 (Mobile Graphics),
- NIC 2001 (Mobile Graphics)
Courses (other than university):

Research Interests

Mobile Augmented Reality: I first started working on AR around 2000, but at that time we had hard time getting real time demos running on laptops. Now mobile phones have real time graphics, good cameras, GPS, internet, enough processing power to make them the ultimate handheld AR devices.
Computational Photography: Nokia is the biggest camera manufacturer, and you can program these cameras. I want to see what can be done with that combination.
Mobile Graphics Standards: I've worked a lot on mobile computer graphics technologies. In particular, I've been involved with standardizing APIs such as OpenGL ES, versions 1.0, 1.1 are complete, 2.0 is under work; M3G, Mobile 3D Graphics for Java MIDP, also known as JSR-184 (specs are here); and OpenVG. I've also headed the efforts for Nokia's implementations of those APIs. Recently we gave a course on these APIs at SIGGRAPH, and wrote a paper on their design.
Computer animation: While I was at MIT, I was collaborating with Jovan Popovic (my host at MIT) and Eugene Hsu on learning and transferring animation styles (SIGGRAPH paper and slides), as well as with Jovan and Robert Wang on animating articulated and non-articulated meshes.
Modeling from range data: I used to do this a lot in my previous life as a PhD student at University of Washington and as a Research Associate at Stanford University (Digital Michelangelo project), but I haven't been very active on that for quite a while. I did write a paper to 3DIM on range and color registration last winter, though it should have been published much earlier as large part of the thinking and programming was done in 1997-98... ( slides)
Symbian programming: I'm also learning how to program Symbian-based S60 mobile phones. My Symbian programming page is here.

Personal Info

Experience

Research Fellow, Nokia, Oulu, Finland, 7/99 -- 5/04; Cambridge, MA, USA 6/04 -- 8/06; Palo Alto, CA, USA 8/06 --
Figuring out how mobile communications can use graphics and imaging and vice versa.
Visiting Scientist, MIT CSAIL, Cambridge, MA 6/04 -- 8/06
More graphics research.
Docent, University of Oulu, Finland 5/00 --
Teaching computer graphics, supervising M.Sc. theses.
Research associate, Stanford University, 1/98 -- 6/99
Technical lead, Digital Michelangelo Project.
Internship, Alias|Wavefront, Seattle, WA, 6/96 -- 9/96.
Research: hierarchical editing of subdivision surfaces.
Internship, Silicon Graphics, Inc., Mountain View, CA, 6/95 -- 9/95.
Fast rendering of subdivision surfaces on Onyx Reality Engine, a possible extension to OpenGL. Included microcoding of the graphics engines and writing an interactive subdivision surface editor using Inventor and Motif libraries.
Internship, Microsoft, Seattle, WA, 6/94 -- 9/94.
3D graphics, porting SoftImage's Creative Environment into NT, building an emulator for running programs written for SGI and old GL on OpenGL and Windows.
Research assistant, University of Washington, 9/93 -- 12/97.
Research in model-based vision using probabilistic models; surface reconstruction from a set of unregistered range and color views.
Research scientist, Radiology Clinic, University hospital in Oulu, Finland, 8/93 -- 9/93.
Design and partial implementation of a system that tracks movement of a tumor as patient breaths.
Research scientist, University of Oulu, Finland, 9/91 -- 7/93.
Developing of range vision software for a robotic paper roll manipulator. (Licentiate thesis)
Research assistant University of Paderborn, Germany, 12/90 -- 8/91.
Implementing a 3D computer graphics rendering system for a transputer based system. (Master's thesis)
Internships, Bayer AG, Leverkusen, Germany, summers '88, '89, and '90.
User interface programming for data base applications.

Awards

Khronos Award for contributions on mobile media API standardization 2006
Finnish Academy Scholar at the University of Washington (twice: 1994-95 and 1996-97)
Fulbright scholar 1993-94 at the University of Washington
The Finnish Technical Society's national prize for the "Diploma (Master's) thesis of 1991"
"Ambassador of Good Will" Rotary International scholar at the University of Paderborn, Germany in 1990-91

Education

Executive MBA, Univ. of Oulu, 06/01
Ph.D. (Comp. Sci.), Univ. of Washington, 12/97
M.Sc. (Comp. Sci.), Univ. of Washington, 6/95
Lic.Tech. (Comp. Eng.), Univ. of Oulu, 5/93
M.Sc. (Electr. Eng.), Univ. of Oulu, 10/91
B.Comp.Sci., Univ. of Minnesota, 6/90

Languages

Roughly in the order of proficiency: Finnish, English, German, Swedish, Italian, Spanish, French.

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