The primary focus of my PhD thesis has been on the efficient computation and the applications of a topological data structure known as the Morse-Smale complex. The first part of the Thesis explored developing a theoretical framework for allowing parallel computation of the Morse-Smale complex. More details on the Project may be obtained from the at the project page which also hosts the Open Source software for the same.
A second part of the thesis focused on applications of the thesis. Here we developed an application for Cosmology and structural biology. The application to Cosmology can be found here . The application on structural biology is still under review and will be updated in the future. I've also actively worked on the application of programmable GPU's for visualization of large bio-molecules such as proteins.
Publications
In reverse chronological order
Felix: A Topology based Framework for Visual Exploration of Cosmic Filaments, Nithin Shivashankar, Pratyush Pranav, Vijay Natarajan, Rien van de Weygaert, E G Patrick Bos, and Steven Rieder, IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics (To appear), 2015 . [Project page/software/paper ]
Efficient Software for Programmable Visual analysis using Morse-Smale Complexes , Nithin Shivashankar and Vijay Natarajan, Topology based Methods in Visualization (TopoInVis15), May 2015. [code] [paper]
Morse-Smale complexes: computation and applications, Nithin Shivashankar, Phd Thesis, September 2014, Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore. [Thesis]
Topological saliency, Harish Doraiswamy, Nithin Shivashankar, Vijay Natarajan, and Yusu Wang, Computers and Graphics, 37 (7), 2013, 787-799.
Improved Quadric Surface Imposters for large bio-molecular Visualization, Pranav D Bagur, Nithin Shivashankar, and Vijay Natarajan, Indian Conference on Vision Graphics and Image Processing (ICVGIP), Mumbai, December 2012. [code]
Parallel computation of 2D Morse-Smale complexes, Nithin Shivashankar, Senthilnathan M, and Vijay Natarjan, IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, October 2012, [project page/software/paper (2D and 3D)]
Parallel computation of 3D Morse-Smale complexes, Nithin Shivashankar and Vijay Natarjan, Computer graphics Forum (EuroVis 2012), Volume 31 - Issue 3, pp. 965-974, [Project page/software/paper (2D and 3D)]