About

I am a PhD student at Yale University advised by Ben Fisch. I am currently focused on incentive alignment in Ethereum and zkML. In a past life I worked on computational physics for the finite element method as a researcher at the University of Colorado and at Yale. I am proudly supported by the NSF CSGrad4US Fellowship and the Yale Sterling Prize Fellowship. I am also a LEAP Fellow representing Yale in diversity initiatives in STEM.

Publications

Lifted curls: a model for tightly coiled hair simulation. (Best Paper Award)

Alvin Shi*, Haomiao Wu*, Jarred Parr, A.M. Darke and T. Kim (* joint 1st authors)

We present an isotropic, hyperelastic model specifically designed for the efficient simulation of tightly coiled hairs whose curl radii approach 5 mm. Our model is robust to large bends and torsions, even when they appear at the scale of the strand discretization. The terms of our model are consistently quadratic with respect to their primary variables, do not require per-edge frames or any parallel transport operators, and can efficiently take large timesteps on the order of 1/30 of a second. Additionally, we show that it is possible to obtain fast, closed-form eigensystems for all the terms in the energy. Our eigenanalysis is sufficiently generic that it generalizes to other models. Our entirely vertex-based formulation integrates naturally with existing finite element codes, and we demonstrate its efficiency and robustness in a variety of scenarios.

Presented at Symposium on Computer Animation (SCA'23)