Brian A. Barsky is Professor of Computer Science and Affiliate Professor of Optometry and Vision Science at the University of California at Berkeley. He is a member of the Joint Graduate Group in Bioengineering, an interdisciplinary and inter-campus program, between UC Berkeley and UC San Francisco.
He was a Directeur de Recherches at the Laboratoire d'Informatique Fondamentale de Lille (LIFL) of l'Université des Sciences et Technologies de Lille (USTL). He has been a Visiting Professor of Computer Science at The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology in Hong Kong, at the University of Otago in Dunedin, New Zealand, in the Modélisation Géométrique et Infographie Interactive group at l'Institut de Recherche en Informatique de Nantes and l'Ecole Centrale de Nantes, in Nantes, and at the University of Toronto in Toronto. Prof. Barsky was a Distinguished Visitor at the School of Computing at the National University of Singapore in Singapore, an Attaché de Recherche Invité at the Laboratoire Image of l'Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Télécommunications in Paris, and a visiting researcher with the Computer Aided Design and Manufacturing Group at the Sentralinsitutt for Industriell Forskning (Central Institute for Industrial Research) in Oslo.
He attended McGill University in Montréal, where he received a D.C.S. in engineering and a B.Sc. in mathematics and computer science. He studied computer graphics and computer science at Cornell University in Ithaca, where he earned an M.S. degree. His Ph.D. degree is in computer science from the University of Utah in Salt Lake City. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Optometry (F.A.A.O.).
He is a co-author of the book An Introduction to Splines for Use in Computer Graphics and Geometric Modeling, co-editor of the book Making Them Move: Mechanics, Control, and Animation of Articulated Figures, and author of the book Computer Graphics and Geometric Modeling Using Beta-splines. He has published 120 technical articles in this field and has been a speaker at many international meetings.
Dr. Barsky was a recipient of an IBM Faculty Development Award and a National Science Foundation Presidential Young Investigator Award. He is an area editor for the journal Graphical Models. He is the Computer Graphics Editor of the Synthesis digital library of engineering and computer science, published by Morgan & Claypool Publishers, and the Series Editor for Computer Science for Course Technology, part of Cengage Learning. He was the editor of the Computer Graphics and Geometric Modeling series of Morgan Kaufmann Publishers, Inc. from December 1988 to September 2004. He was the Technical Program Committee Chair for the Association for Computing Machinery / SIGGRAPH '85 conference.
His research interests include computer aided geometric design and modeling, interactive three-dimensional computer graphics, visualization in scientific computing, computer aided cornea modeling and visualization, medical imaging, and virtual environments for surgical simulation.
He has been working in spline curve/surface representation and their applications in computer graphics and geometric modeling for many years. He is applying his knowledge of curve/surface representations as well as his computer graphics experience to improving videokeratography and corneal topographic mapping, forming a mathematical model of the cornea, and providing computer visualization of patients' corneas to clinicians. This has applications in the design and fabrication of contact lenses, and in laser vision correction surgery. His current research, called Vision-Realistic Rendering is developing new three-dimensional rendering techniques for the computer generation of synthetic images that will simulate the vision of specific individuals based on their actual patient data using measurements from a instrument a Shack-Hartmann wavefront aberrometery device. This research forms the OPTICAL (OPtics and Topography Involving Cornea and Lens) project.
