CDFG The Computational Design & Fabrication Group

The Computational Design and Fabrication Group at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory investigates problems in digital manufacturing and computer graphics. The group is led by Professor Wojciech Matusik.

News

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05-22-2023

Two papers to be presented at SIGGRAPH 2023

Members of the CDFG will be presenting two papers at SIGGRAPH 2023, on the topic of procedural graph representations for... Read More

05-22-2023

Liane Makatura wins Design Fellowship from the MIT Morningside Academy for Design

Our lab member, Liane Makatura, has been named as a MAD Design Fellow, as part of the MIT Morningside... Read More

12-05-2022

Liang Shi awarded Snap Fellowship

Our group member Liang Shi has been award the Snap Fellowship 2022. Congratulations!

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Selected Publications

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Nature Electronics

Learning Human-environment Interactions using Conformal Tactile Textiles

Yiyue Luo, Yunzhu Li, Pratyusha Sharma, Wan Shou, Kui Wu, Michael Foshey, Beichen Li, Tomás Palacios, Antonio Torralba, Wojciech Matusik

Nature

Towards real-time photorealistic 3D holography with deep neural networks

Liang Shi, Beichen Li, Changil Kim, Petr Kellnhofer, Wojciech Matusik

Nature

Learning the signatures of the human grasp using a scalable tactile glove

Subramanian Sundaram, Petr Kellnhofer, Yunzhu Li, Jun-Yan Zhu, Antonio Torralba, Wojciech Matusik

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Research

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Computational Design

Our lab has a strong interest in developing a holistic computational solution for designing and optimizing cyber-physical systems (e.g., robots). Our research topics include: 1. Proposing continuous, discrete, or hybrid methods for design-space representation and parametrization. 2. Developing fast, reliable, and differentiable physics simulators for efficient evaluation of a design. 3. Researching novel numerical optimization techniques for co-optimizing a cyber-physical system's body and brain. 4. Exploring designs efficiently and effectively in the context of multi-objective performance metrics.

Computer Graphics

Our group has a strong track record of publishing graphics research papers at top-tier conferences (SIGGRAPH, SIGGRAPH Asia) and journals (TOG). Some topics that we are currently interested in include 1) Physics simulation of all kinds and its applications in machine learning, robotics, and computer vision, 2) Computer-aided design, shape models, shape analysis, and especially their industry-level applications, 3) Appearance modeling, (procedural) material design, modeling, rendering, and visualization, and of course, 4) computational design and fabrication of cyber-physical systems.

Computer Vision

Our group actively works on different vision problems in the following domains: 1); Gaze tracking; 2) Novel view synthesis for 3D displays; 3) Multimodal learning (i.e., voice-face, pressure map-pose); 4) Computational photography (i.e., motion magnification, semantic soft segmentation); 5) Datasets for new learning tasks (CAD models, holograms, gaze, flash/no-flash photographs). Recent works have been published in ICCV, ECCV, CVPR, ICML, and NeurlPS.

Fabrication

Our research in fabrication explores new types of fabrication processes and systems that will have a broad impact on how humans design and build things. We combine computational design, machine learning to model, understand, and extend fabrication processes such as additive manufacturing, machine knitting, and conventional manufacturing processes. Our recent research in this area has included developing multi-material manufacturing systems to create 3D shapes out of high-performance functional and structural materials and new manufacturing methods to create garments that sense and classify human activity.

Human-Computer Interaction

Our main recent HCI endeavors center around (1) digital tools for fabrications and (2) new user applications harnessing functional materials. By developing new digital tools, we are interested in how users can create more complex physical artifacts while enabling the customization of form, appearance and function. Recent works include the development of novel workflows for programming weft knitting machines, and the user authoring of complex digital materials for 3D printing. Furthermore, we are developing custom yarns that enable functional applications such as active on-body force sensing and human-machine / machine-environment interactions.

Robotics

Our group has strong interests in a variety of Robotics research topics, including (1) efficient (differentiable) simulation tools for all kinds of robotic systems (e.g. rigid robots and soft robots), (2) machine learning algorithms (e.g. reinforcement learning) for robotics control, (3) computational design methods for co-optimizing both the structure/shape and the controller of various types of robots (e.g. robotic hand, terrestrial robots, underwater robots, aerial robots, etc.) for single or multiple objectives/tasks, (4) tactile sensing devices and their applications in robotic control systems. Recent work has been published in top-tier robotics and machine learning conferences and journals such as RSS, RAL, ICRA, ICML, etc.

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