Section: Overall Objectives

Overall Objectives

ALICE is a team founded in 2004 by Bruno Lévy. The main scientific goal of ALICE was to develop new algorithms for computer graphics, with a special focus on geometry processing. From 2004 to 2006, we developed new methods for automatic texture mapping (LSCM, ABF++, PGP), that became the de-facto standards. Then we realized that these algorithms could be used to create an abstraction of shapes, that could be used for geometry processing and modeling purposes, which we developed from 2007 to 2013 within the GOODSHAPE StG ERC project. We transformed the research prototype stemming from this project into an industrial geometry processing software, with the VORPALINE PoC ERC project, and commercialized it (TOTAL, Dassault Systems, + GeonX and ANSYS currently under discussion). From 2013 to 2018, we developed more contacts and cooperations with the “scientific computing” and “meshing” research communities.

After a part of the team “spun off” around Sylvain Lefebvre and his ERC project SHAPEFORGE to become the MFX team (on additive manufacturing and computer graphics), we progressively moved the center of gravity of the rest of the team from computer graphics towards scientific computing and computational physics, in terms of cooperations, publications and industrial transfer.

We realized that geometry plays a central role in numerical simulation, and that “cross-pollinization” with methods from our field (graphics) will lead to original algorithms. In particular, computer graphics routinely uses irregular and dynamic data structures, more seldom encountered in scientific computing. Conversely, scientific computing routinely uses mathematical tools that are not well spread and not well understood in computer graphics. Our goal is to establish a stronger connection between both domains, and exploit the fundamental aspects of both scientific cultures to develop new algorithms for computational physics.