More about Me

I am an assistant professor in the Computer Science Department at Boise State University. My area of research is computer graphics.

Education

Ph.D. Computer Science, University of Utah, 2003
M.S. Mathematics, University of Washington, 1993
B.S. in mathematics, minor in physics, Boise State University, 1990

I finished my Ph.D. dissertation in the Summer of 2002 at the School of Computing at the University of Utah (when I started there it was still just the "Department of Computer Science"). My committee signed off on my Ph.D. dissertation in the summer of 2002; the degree was awarded officially in May 2003. My advisor at Utah was Richard F. Riesenfeld, My other departmental committee members were Elaine Cohen, Peter Shirley, and Frank Stenger. My external committee member was Tom Lyche at the University of Oslo, Norway.

While at Utah, I worked in the Geometric Design and Computation research group, and I was also affiliated with the Visual Simulation Group. My research was largely funded by the NSF Graphics and Visualization Center.

In November of 2002, I accepted the position of Associate Research Specialist in the School of Information & Computer Sciences at the University of California, Irvine. I went there in order to work with James Arvo, one of the most brilliant people I have ever known. We worked on a number of projects, but for a time we worked on geometric optical path problems which was funded by the NSF/DARPA Computational and Algorithmic Representation of Geometric Objects (CARGO) project. I also worked with Gopi Meenakshisundaram and Kevin Novins.

Thanks in part to California budget woes our funding at UCI ended in May of 2004. I continued the appointment but "without pay" through the end of 2004; part of this time I was funded as an adjunct researcher back at Utah through the generosity of my former committee member Peter Shirley.

Before I got into computer science, I was more interested in mathematics. My mathematics graduate work at Washington emphasized complex analysis and celestial mechanics. I worked with Don Marshall and my master's work was supervised by Robin Graham. I also had the pleasure of taking several courses in geometry and polytope theory from Branko Grübaum.

Research

My PhD. research involved the mathematical foundations of computer graphics, particularly in closed-form analytical solutions to irradiance problems. Since then I have branched out into other areas of rendering, including surface reflectance and transport theory for global illumination. I have also worked on the tone reproduction problem.

Incidentally, I use the name "Michael M. Stark" on my publications because there is another "Michael Stark" in graphics (who, coincidentally, even looks a bit like me).

Collaborators

My most productive research has come through collaboration. Below is a complete list of my coauthors.

Jim Arvo University of California, Irvine
Michael Ashikhmin formerly at Stony Brook University
Solomon Boulos Stanford Unviersity
Elaine Cohen University of Utah
Julie Dorsey Yale University
Frédo Durand Massachusets Institute of Techology, Laboratory for Computer Science
Dave Edwards University of Utah
James Ferwerda Cornell University
Henrik Wann Jensen University of California, San Diego
Jared Johnson University of Utah
Tom Lyche University of Olso, Norway
Bill Martin now at Visual Influence
Simon Premoze now at Industrial Light & Magic
Erik Reinhard University of Bristol, UK
Richard F. Riesenfeld University of Utah
Pete Shirley University of Utah
Brian Smits now at Pixar
Chris Wyman University of Iowa

Friends and Colleagues

Below is a partial list of some colleagues I have published with, worked with, or otherwise think are cool.

(People move around a lot in my field, so please forgive any out of date links.)

Erdös and Einstein Numbers

My Erdös number is (at most) 4; my Einstein number is (at most) 5.

Personal Stuff

My father, Frank W. Stark, is Professor Emeritus of Chemistry at Boise State, having started at Boise Junior College in 1957.

Mike Stark