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We present an algorithm to efficiently and robustly process collisions, contact and friction in cloth simulation. It works with any technique for simulating the internal dynamics of the cloth, and allows true modeling of cloth thickness. We also show how our simulation data can be post-processed with a collision-aware subdivision scheme to produce smooth and interference free data for rendering.

This software package is a Matlab implementation of infeasible path-following algorithms for solving standard semidefinite programming (SDP) problems. Mehrotratype predictor-corrector variants are included. Analogous algorithms for the homogeneous formulation of the standard SDP problem are also implemented. Four types of search directions are available, namely, the AHO, HKM, NT, and GT directions. A few classes of SDP problems are included as well. Numerical results for these classes show that our algorithms are fairly efficient and robust on problems with dimensions of the order of a few hundreds.

We present a method for simulating water and smoke on an unrestricted octree data structure exploiting mesh refinement techniques to capture the small scale visual detail. We propose a new technique for discretizing the Poisson equation on this octree grid. The resulting linear system is symmetric positive definite enabling the use of fast solution methods such as preconditioned conjugate gradients, whereas the standard approximation to the Poisson equation on an octree grid results in a non-symmetric linear system which is more computationally challenging to invert. The semi-Lagrangian characteristic tracing technique is used to advect the velocity, smoke density, and even the level set making implementation on an octree straightforward. In the case of smoke, we have multiple refinement criteria including object boundaries, optical depth, and vorticity concentration. In the case of water, we refine near the interface as determined by the zero isocontour of the level set function.

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This dissertation focuses on efficiently forming reduced-order models for large, linear dynamic systems. Projections onto unions of Krylov subspaces lead to a class of reducedorder models known as rational interpolants. The cornerstone of this dissertation is a collection of theory relating Krylov projection to rational interpolation. Based on this theoretical framework, three algorithms for model reduction are proposed. The first algorithm, dual rational Arnoldi, is a numerically reliable approach involving orthogonal projection matrices. The second, rational Lanczos, is an efficient generalization of existing Lanczos-based methods. The third, rational power Krylov, avoids orthogonalization and is suited for parallel or approximate computations. The performance of the three algorithms is compared via a combination of theory and examples. Independent of the precise algorithm, a host of supporting tools are also developed to form a complete model-reduction package. Techniques for choosing the matching frequencies, estimating the modeling error, insuring the model's stability, treating multiple-input multiple-output systems, implementing parallelism, and avoiding a need for exact factors of large matrix pencils are all examined to various degrees.

Logistic regression with ℓ1 regularization has been proposed as a promising method for feature selection in classification problems. In this paper we describe an efficient interior-point method for solving large-scale ℓ1-regularized logistic regression problems. Small problems with up to a thousand or so features and examples can be solved in seconds on a PC; medium sized problems, with tens of thousands of features and examples, can be solved in tens of seconds (assuming some sparsity in the data). A variation on the basic method, that uses a preconditioned conjugate gradient method to compute the search step, can solve very large problems, with a million features and examples (e.g., the 20 Newsgroups data set), in a few minutes, on a PC. Using warm-start techniques, a good approximation of the entire regularization path can be computed much more efficiently than by solving a family of problems independently.

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We examine the problem of generating state-space compressions of POMDPs in a way that minimally impacts decision quality. We analyze the impact of compressions on decision quality, observing that compressions that allow accurate policy evaluation (prediction of expected future reward) will not affect decision quality.

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