From Meshing to Solution: A Unified Black-Box FEM Pipeline for Complex Geometries

Speaker: Teseo Schneider, University of Victoria, Canada

Abstract: The numerical solution of partial differential equations (PDEs) is central to computer graphics and engineering, from UV mapping and skinning weights to the simulation of elastic deformations, fluids, and light scattering. The finite element method (FEM) is the most widely used PDE discretization due to its generality and mature software ecosystem. Ideally, a PDE solver should be a black box: given the domain boundary, boundary conditions, and governing equations, it returns an evaluator of the solution anywhere in the domain. In practice, this remains elusive because meshing and FEM basis construction are often treated separately. We present recent advances toward an integrated meshing-element pipeline enabling black-box simulations on 10,000 in-the-wild meshes without parameter tuning.

Link: From Meshing to Solution: A Unified Black-Box FEM Pipeline for Complex Geometries | Meeting-Join | Microsoft Teams

Biography: Teseo Schneider is an Assistant Professor in Computer Science at the University of Victoria, Canada. Teseo earned his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the Universita della Svizzera italiana (2017) with the thesis entitled "Theory and Applications of Bijective Barycentric Mappings." He earned a PostdocMobility fellowship from the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) to pursue his research at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Science at the New York University, aiming to bridge physical simulations and geometry. His research interests are finite element simulations, mathematics, discrete differential geometry, and geometry processing. Teseo is the leading developer of Polyfem (https://polyfem.github.io/), a flexible and easy-to-use Finite Element Library. He is one of the maintainers of libigl (https://github.com/libigl/libigl) and a contributor to wild meshing (https://github.com/wildmeshing), a 2D and 3D robust meshing library. In 2022, Teseo was awarded the Young Investigator Award by Shape Modelling International and the Cowie Faculty Innovation Award by the University of Victoria. In 2024 he was awarded the Early Career Researcher Award from Graphics Interface.

Host: Dr. Patrick Zulian