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SIGGRAPH 2016 Insights and Observations

SIGGRAPH 2016

It was a great joy to be a part of SIGGRAPH for the 33rd time, since it is the best place every year to learn about everything new in computer graphics.

SIGGRAPH Session
Figure 1. In session at SIGGRAPH 2016

At SIGGRAPH 2016, Intel presented sessions on occlusion culling, deep learning, high-dynamic range video, 360 video editing workflow for VR, and 4K video scaling. You can find the slides from these presentations on our SIGGRAPH Special Sessions page. We try to help SIGGRAPH attendees learn too, especially from other companies we’ve worked with that have recently achieved outstanding results. Some of Intel’s tech sessions presented at SIGGRAPH included:

  • Narrative Fiction Storytelling in 360 Stereoscopic Panoramic VR: Old Techniques are New. Rules vs. Standards – This session with our partners from 30 Ninjas and Mettle almost got us in trouble with the fire marshal – we had to limit the number of attendees in the room due to fire regulations. This session focused on the software and hardware tools used in a 360 video editing workflow and explained how Intel’s BDW-E and Workstation platforms are ideal solutions to deliver the performance needed.
  • Masked Software Occlusion Culling – Magnus Andersson presented a novel algorithm inspired by recent advances in depth culling for graphics hardware, but adapted and optimized for SIMD-capable CPUs. This algorithm has very low memory overhead and is 3× faster than previous work, while culling 98 percent of all triangles culled by a full-resolution depth buffer approach.
  • High-Dynamic Range (HDR) Demystified – Scott Janus explained HDR (high-dynamic range) and the challenges of properly displaying it on existing computer devices. He also explained how Intel® graphics can drive compelling new HDR capabilities that game and media/image developers can use to deliver clearly differentiable experiences to end users.
  • Ultra HD Video Scaling: Low-power Hardware FF vs. Convolutional Neural Network-based Super-Resolution – Yes, there were some mathematical formulas in this talk. Victor Ha described how an Intel graphics feature called Scaler and Format Converter (SFC) provides a high-quality video scaling solution at low power.
  • clCaffe*: Unleashing the Power of Intel Graphics for Deep Learning Acceleration – Jingyi Jin presented OpenCL* acceleration of the well-known deep learning framework Caffe*. Benchmark results showed it runs 4.5x faster on Intel graphics compared to the default CPU implementation.

In addition to Intel’s tech sessions, we also presented in the SIGGRAPH course The Quest for the Ray Tracing API and gave a talk on new features in Embree. Vibhav Vineet from Intel was a co-author on a paper called SemanticPaint: Interactive Segmentation and Learning of 3D Worlds.

Cappasity’s demo
Figure 2. Cappasity’s demo acquired a 3D model of a person in 40 seconds using Intel® RealSense™ camera technology.

Our booth at SIGGRAPH featured compelling games, graphics, and digital content creation software running on a remarkably diverse range of Intel® client and workstation hardware. Demos included the following:

  • Autodesk Maya* running on a 10-core Intel® Core™ i7-6950X Processor Extreme Edition
  • Professional graphics connecting an Intel® Xeon® processor-based mobile workstation to a remote cluster
  • Games running on the latest Intel® NUC (Skull Canyon)
  • Adaptive Screen Space Ambient Occlusion (a technique developed in SSG) running on an Intel® Core™ i7 processor with Intel® Iris™ graphics
  • A variety of usage cases for Thunderbolt™ 3 technology
  • VR on high-end desktop and mobile workstation

The highlight had to be the full-body scanning demo from Cappasity (Figure 2). Cappasity employees created full-body scans of more than 200 people who came by our booth! If you didn’t make it to SIGGRAPH this year, you can still learn about the demos we had in our booth by following the links to videos and resources on our SIGGRAPH booth page.

Sideways Photo Booth
Figure 3. The Sideways Photo Booth

We tried out a new activity to engage attendees, the “Sideways Photo Booth” (Figure 3), which provided a set for people to take a creative photo. The set created the illusion of a gravity-defying work environment being sucked into the vacuum of space. Turning the resulting image 90 degrees completes the illusion.

Intel® Academic Reception
Figure 4. Fun and networking with graphics industry giants at the Intel® Academic Reception

As always, our Intel® Academic Reception was a lot of fun. We had a great venue at the ESPN Zone in Downtown Disney and we spent the evening talking and playing games with our industry friends (Figure 4).

A few insights from SIGGRAPH 2016:

  • The Making of Marvel’s “Captain America: Civil War”: Filmmakers no longer need to have actors on location. Instead, they now send small crews out on location to capture imagery; 200,000 photos of Puerto Rico and Iceland stood in as the background for scenes set in Nigeria and Russia. This imagery is used with studio-based green-screen filming to make it look like action is taking place anywhere in the world. Physical sets reduced to smaller 3D models are also captured with imagery and physical measurement (e.g., LIDAR) allowing animators to perfectly match live action and CGI.
  • Natalia Taturchuk (Bungie) and Wade Brainerd (Activision) described a “pain point” for the art production pipeline: a lack of tools. They would like the artist to create great art and then push one button to create engine-ready assets. Sounds like a good goal!
  • Morgan McGuire (Williams College) gave a great talk on the future of real-time transparency. Solving for transparency requires understanding that the issues boil down to two causes: transmission and partial coverage. “Transmission is real, and is rendering. Partial coverage is artificial and trades one problem for another,” commented McGuire.
  • Isotropix showed AMAZING real-time ray tracing – one demo scene had 48 BILLION polygons rendered interactively (tens of thousands of bugs with 27,000 polys each).

If you weren’t able to make it to SIGGRAPH this year, we hope that we’ve been able to provide you with material to help you learn about what you missed. And we hope to see you at SIGGRAPH 2017!

SIGGRAPH Anaheim Convention Center

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G7 Publishes Cybersecurity Guidelines for Global Finance

The Group of Seven industrial powers wrote up a basic, yet foundational, cybersecurity strategy and operational framework document.  It is intended to be the building blocks of consistency across the financial sector and includes 8 basic elements of cybersecurity practice.  This 3 page paper, G7 Fundamental Elements of Cybersecurity for the Financial Sector, makes recommendations which are drawn from the established best practices for cybersecurity.

The elements covered in the paper are:

  1. Cybersecurity Strategy and Framework
  2. Governance
  3. Risk and Control Assessment
  4. Monitoring
  5. Response
  6. Recovery
  7. Information sharing
  8. Continuous Learning

This is a good list.  There is nothing new from a practices perspective, as all these are part of an effective cybersecurity program, but I found two details to be interesting and telling of where the financial sector is heading.

First, the G7 recommends governance bodies, such as boards of directors, to establish their ‘cyber risk tolerance’ for entities they oversee.  This is a huge step upwards in the maturity ladder.  Most organizations treat security as a function of addressing vulnerabilities to eliminating risk.  This is rudimentary thinking.  Risks are managed (mitigated, accepted, transferred, etc.) but not eliminated altogether.  That would be far too costly and impactful, if not outright impossible.  It takes a mature organization to realize they are seeking an optimal balance for the risks they face, with tradeoffs between cost/risk/usability.  To outright state leaders should quantify their ‘risk tolerance’ or sometimes referred to as ‘risk appetite’ is a momentous step towards understanding the realities of cybersecurity and identifying a realistic target for the program.

Second, the G7 recommended deep information sharing with internal and external shareholders, including public authorities outside the financial sector.  Many barriers have plagued initiatives to share sensitive security information within this community.  It is important and valuable, as sharing attack data in a timely fashion becomes the ‘canary in the coalmine’ that can act as an early warning sign to the rest of the community, which greatly reduces overall losses.  This recommendation is a sign that these countries will work to overcome the entrenched bias and limitations to good threat sharing.  If the financial sector can make this happen, then it can work in just about every other sector of the economy as well.

Both of these areas represent a leadership direction that is forward-thinking and rooted in good cybersecurity practices.  Although the paper is brief, the real benefit will be in the outcomes it drives across the global finance sector.

 

Interested in more?  Follow me on Twitter (@Matt_Rosenquist) and LinkedIn to hear insights and what is going on in cybersecurity.

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The Best of Modern Code | October

Modern Code Winners at Cern

Intel® Modern Code Challenge Winners Come to CERN

  Last week, winners of the Intel® Modern Code Challenge came to CERN. They met leading researchers and toured the laboratory’s world-leading facilities.  Read about their visit.


Common Code

Multithreaded Transposition of Square Matrices with Common Code for Intel® Xeon® Processors and Intel® Xeon Phi™ Coprocessors

Demonstrate and discuss an efficient C language implementation of parallel in-place square matrix transposition.


BerkeleyGW*

Case Study: Using BerkeleyGW* on Intel® Xeon Phi™ Processors

Discover the ins and outs of BerkeleyGW*—a materials science application that calculates the excited state properties of materials.


Streams Library

Introduction to the Heterogeneous Streams Library

Learn about basic heterogeneous streams (hStreams) concepts. Also learn how to build and run an MPI program that takes advantage of the hStreams interface.


Like this content?  There’s more like it at Modern Code Home.

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The Fab Five: Game Dev Zone Content | October

Cloud Gaming

How GameStream* Answers the Challenges of Cloud Gaming

By leveraging advances in processors from Intel, the cloud gaming service from GameStream* offers players the ability to play the latest and greatest games online.


Open GL*

OpenGL* Performance Tips: Avoid Calls that Synchronize a CPU and GPU

To get the highest level of performance from OpenGL*, avoid calls that force synchronization between the CPU and the GPU. Learn about several of those calls and ways to avoid using them.


Virtual Archaeology

Experience Virtual Archaeology with the 7VR Wonders of the Ancient World

Experience unique places from ancient history with the 7VR Wonders of the Ancient World game.


New Intel Graphics

Download the New Intel® Graphics Driver Windows® 10 and Windows 7*/8.1

Whether you’re a casual gamer, power user, or extreme gamer, this driver is aimed to improve your overall experience. For Windows® 10, Windows 8.1*, and Windows 7*.


Open GL* Performance Tips

OpenGL* Performance Tips: Using Dedicated Frame Buffer Objects (FBO)

Improve OpenGL* performance by swapping FBOs instead of using a single FBO and swapping surfaces. Download your code samples now.


Like this content? Sign up for the Game Dev Bytes Newsletter. If you missed last month’s Fab Five, read it here.

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Should Cybercrime Victims be Allowed to Hack-Back?

Being hacked is a frustrating experience for individuals and businesses, but allowing victims to hack-back against their attackers is definitely a dangerous and ill-advised path.

Compounding the issues is the apparent inability of law enforcement and governments to do anything about it.  Cybercrime is expected to reach a dizzying $6 trillion dollars by 2021, according to CybersecurityVentures’s crime report.  With so much at risk and so little being done, tempers can quickly rise.  Many are askingwhy not let people and companies hack-back their attackers?  Some have gone so far as to say the U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ) and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) have not declared it to be illegal.

Well, it is.  Not only is it illegal, it is a terrible idea fraught with peril and liability.

This is not the Wild West

Individuals are not judge, jury, and executioner.  We as a society have long ago decided upon following the rules of due process.  Otherwise chaos and victimization run rampant at the cost of people’s rights and liberties.  The same will hold true with cyber hack-back schemes.

Foremost, it is extremely difficult, nearly impossible in fact, to know exactly who is hacking you in a digital environment.  Security professionals call it ‘attestation’.  Knowing who is behind the attack.

In the course of events and investigation, you may see an IP address of the would be assailant, but it could be false.  It is easy to ‘spoof’ your identity and appear as someone else.  It is trivial to forge credentials or fake an Internet address, email, machine name, network card number, or just about any other form of digital identity.  Even if the offending system is properly identified, it could be hacked itself and under the control of others.  You may bring down or impact another innocent victim, just like you.  Conversely, someone downstream might inadvertently attack your systems, thinking you were knowingly attacking them.

The risks of unintended consequences are very high

What if your hack-back efforts brings down a hospital, critical infrastructure, or a safety system?  Innocent people could be injured or even die.  Is that acceptable?  You may cause more damage and create more victims.  Not a very good plan and you have no way of knowing what cascade effects will result.  Hack-back actions may end up being disproportionate and viewed as more harmful to the community than the original offense.

Vigilantism is rarely a good path in modern times.  People who believe they have the right to dole out justice then begin to define what is a crime and what they can rightfully do about it.  The difference between a crime, what is unjust, and something they just don’t like, can get blurred.  This is a dangerous slope.

We do not want just anyone to decide what constitutes being ‘hacked’.  There are already cases where people take such situations to the extreme and call foul.  I talked with one shop owner who thought a customer’s bad review of their product was a ‘hack’ and they should be punished.  They wanted to hack-back this persons systems so they could not write any more bad reviews.  I was shocked and strongly advised against such actions.  I would not want to give them or anyone else driven by emotion, the latitude to then act upon such opinions.

For some it is tough to fathom.  Being attacked and choosing to not respond seems cowardice.  But as attribution is not clear, it we must withhold from brazen and unguided outbursts.  If your wallet goes missing in a crowded stadium, should you start tackling people who you think could have been involved?  That will likely get you in far more trouble with the crowd and with law enforcement.  At the end of the day I suspect you will either be in a holding cell or the hospital.  Either way, you would have time to reflect on your poor decision.

A terrible idea

Hacking people, even those who you suspect are behind attacks against you, is not recommended.  The White House describes it as “a terrible idea”.  Security professionals, echo the same sentiment.  Hacking others, even if they are in the wrong, opens you up to significant liability.  Any business or individual who pursues this course should be prepared to pay a multiple of the damage they cause to whomever they hack.  It does not necessarily matter if they started it or not.  No matter how passionate you might feel in the moment, lashing out with a risk of harming other systems and people is not the best path.

So let’s put this issue behind us and rally our efforts to more productive endeavors.  We should be working on how to better predict, prevent, detect, and recover from attacks.  Governments and law enforcement must continue to develop better tools to quickly track down culprits, remove their ability to victimize others, and have the tools to gather necessary evidence to properly prosecute cybercriminals in alignment with established laws and justice procedures.  Technology should fuel our evolution forward to a better society, not push us back into feudal states of retribution and individual revenge.

 

Interested in more?  Follow me on Twitter (@Matt_Rosenquist) and LinkedIn to hear insights and what is going on in cybersecurity.

 

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Fueling Transformation Pt. 3: Safeguard IT Infrastructure for the Future

Infrastructure (noun) ‘in-frə-ˌstrək-chər’: The underlying foundation or basic framework (as of a system or organization). The term infrastructure is ubiquitous in our business. But, stop for a minute to think about the gravity of its meaning. Infrastructure isn’t transient; it … Read more >

The post Fueling Transformation Pt. 3: Safeguard IT Infrastructure for the Future appeared first on Technology Provider.

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