May the force be with you...

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I am an R&D Software Engineer. I was born in Mérida, Venezuela. I got a Master of Science degree in Computer Science from the University of Houston in 2012, and a degree in Systems Engineer degree from the Universidad de Los Andes in 2007.

I worked as a Research Assistant at the UH CGIM Lab, and as a Teaching Assistant at the UH Department of CS, until December 2013. My advisor at UH was Dr. Zhigang Deng. My research interests include Computer Graphics, Computer Animation, GPU Computing, and Human-Computer Interaction.

Since March 2014, I work at HERE Technologies (previously known as Nokia Maps, and Navteq before that), where I've done augmented reality for pedestrian navigation, map rendering, navigation systems for fancy cars, and high-definition maps for autonomous driving.

Publications

GPU-Accelerated Interactive Visualization and Planning of Neurosurgical Interventions. M. Rincón-Nigro, N.V. Navkar, N.V. Tsekos, Z. Deng. IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications, Jan/Feb 2014, pp. 14-23.

A Text-Driven Conversational Avatar Interface for Instant Messaging on Mobile Devices. M. Rincón-Nigro, Z. Deng. IEEE Transactions on Human-Machine Systems (THMS), 43(2), May 2013, pp. 328-332.
Demo Video MP4 MPG

Cost-based Workload Balancing for Ray Tracing on Multi-GPU Systems. M. Rincón-Nigro, Z. Deng. ACM SIGGRAPH 2013 Research Poster, Anaheim, CA, July 2013.

Automatic Code Generation from Finite State Machines. M. Rincón-Nigro, J. Aguilar-Castro, F. Hidrobo-Torres. Computación y Sistemas, 14(4), April 2011, pp. 405-421. (In Spanish)

Improving Energy-Efficiency of General-Purpose GPU Computing Through Statistical Power Consumption Modeling. X. Ma, M. Rincón-Nigro, Z. Deng. University of Houston. Technical Report, 2011.

This is a small gallery of stuff I have done either for courses I've taken or just for fun.

Digital Darkroom

In 2010, I got a copy of the book Beyond Photography: The Digital Darkroom by Gerard J. Holzmann. I wrote an interpreter of image transformations based on the one described in the book.

new[x, y] = old[rect(1.5 * r ** 2 / R, a)]

The source code in Python for this is available here Github repos. Check out the catalog of transformations.

Ray Tracing

I read somewhere that ray tracing is a rite-of-passage in computer graphics. I took it as an invitation as well as a challenge. I wrote from scratch the ray tracer that rendered these images. I learned a lot from the book "Realistic Ray Tracing" by Peter Shirley, and later from a bunch of papers I've ran into. My rite-of-passage isn't over yet.
Depth of field, instancing and noise Motion blur, and more instancing and noise Shadows and one-bounce inter-reflections Reflections and refractions

Boiling water

This is a simulation of boiling water. It is based on a cellular automaton called the Yanagita model. I learned about it in "A Simple Boiling Module", T. Kim, M. Carlson (SCA 2007). The Yanagita model was implemented in 2D, along with a way to visualize the result. The implementation in 3D... I'll finish it when I have some time to spare. Feel free to lend me a couple of coding hands :)

Texture Synthesis and Transfer

In Fall 2009, I took a course in Digital Image Processing at UH with Dr. Shishir Shah. As part of the course, I implemented "Image Quilting for Texture Synthesis and Transfer", A. Efros, B. Freeman (SIGGRAPH 2001.)
Coming soon...

Scientific Visualization

In Fall 2012, I took a course in Scientific Visualization with Dr. Guoning Chen. I enjoyed the homeworks so much that I'll just pay my tribute here.
Coming soon...