(last name pronounced "seh-YAN")

About me

Hi! I am a second-year Computer Science PhD student at the University of Toronto, advised by Alec Jacobson and working in Computer Graphics and Geometry Processing. I am a Vanier Doctoral Scholar and the winner of the 2021 University of Toronto FAS Dean's Doctoral Excellence Scholarship. I have interned twice at Adobe Research under the mentorship of Noam Aigerman and twice at the Fields Institute of Mathematics. I am also an organizer of the Toronto Geometry Colloquium. Before all that, I completed a B.Sc. in Mathematics and a B.Sc. in Physics at the University of Oviedo. You can click here to download my full resume. The best way to contact me is to email me (preferrably in English or Spanish) at sgsellan (at) cs.toronto.edu, but you can also message me on twitter or follow me to stay up to date on my research (combined with some random thoughts every now and then).

Publications

	Swept Volumes via Spacetime Numerical Continuation Silvia Sellán, Noam Aigerman, Alec Jacobson ACM Transactions on Graphics (SIGGRAPH), 2021 [Paper] [Paper (low res)] [Code] [Video ] [Project Page] [Talk ]
	Opening and Closing Surfaces Silvia Sellán, Jacob Kesten, Ang Yan Sheng, Alec Jacobson ACM Transactions on Graphics (SIGGRAPH Asia), 2020 [Paper] [Paper (low res)] [Code] [Video ] [Project Page] [Talk ]
	Developability of Heightfields via Rank Minimization Silvia Sellán, Noam Aigerman, Alec Jacobson ACM Transactions on Graphics (SIGGRAPH), 2020 [Paper] [Paper (low res)] [Code] [Project Page] [Talk ]
	Solid Geometry Processing on Deconstructed Domains Silvia Sellán, Herng Yi Cheng, Yuming Ma, Mitchell Dembowski, Alec Jacobson Computer Graphics Forum (Eurographics), 2019 [Paper] [Paper (low res)] [Arxiv] [Code] [Project Page] [Talk]

Graphics Replicability Stamp granted English closed captioning Spanish subtitles U.S. Patent

News

Here's some things I've been involved with or have happened to me recently:

• I have won the Faculty of Arts & Science Dean's Doctoral Excellence Scholarship, a 25,000 dollar award given to a single PhD student at the University of Toronto.


• I have been granted a Vanier Doctoral Scholarship by the National Science and Engineering Research Council of Canada. Woo-hoo!


• My latest first-author paper, "Swept Volumes via Numerical Spacetime Continuation", was accepted for publication at SIGGRAPH 2021! You can read it here and you can watch me present it here.


• Throughout the Fall of 2020, I have spoken about developable surfaces at Carnegie Mellon University, the Toronto Geometry Colloquium and the Technion - Israel Institute of Technology. The last of these was recorded, and you can watch it here.


• I have been awarded the Beatrice "Trixie" Worsley Graduate Scholarship in Computer Science, given to students who have taken an active role in helping to promote women in the field of computer science.


• I presented my newest paper, "Opening and Closing Surfaces", at SIGGRAPH Asia 2020. The virtual talk is available closed captioned here.

Skills to write a SIGGRAPH paper

There are many skills not necessarily related to geometry or math that are required to make a polished SIGGRAPH submission. Every submission season, I end up going through a combination of my memory from the previous season, old Slack threads that I can only find with very specific keywords and trusting that google remembers the last time I searched for these things. No more! I will list the resources here so that I can come back to this site when the deadline approaches and, who knows, maybe you will find it helpful too!

1. A simple template for Blender renderings of static meshes.
2. How to make an animation of a mesh sequence with Blender.
3. How to compress a PDF to ~20MB using Adobe Acrobat Pro (by Alec Jacobson).

Thinking about applying to graduate school?

The process of applying to graduate school can be overwhelming, especially given how opaque and expensive it can be, especially if you are not from North America. I have been asked for advice many times on this so, while I make it clear I don't consider myself an expert on this topic nor do I claim to have all the (or, really, any of) the answers, I've decided to gather some resources that may help you if you're thinking about applying:

1. Here's the research statement I used when I applied in the Fall of 2018.
2. I faced a hard decision on which lab to join for my PhD. Something that really helped with making a choice was asking a consistent set of questions to every prospective advisor. Here they are in case you find them useful.
3. Episodes 101 and onwards of the Podcast Hello PhD make for a good guide on the whole application process, albeit some of their lessons can be limited to the biomedical sciences.
4. My labmate Towaki Takikawa wrote this amazing overview of Graduate School in Canada, which I highly recommend if you're considering different schools to apply to!.

If you are thinking about applying to graduate school and are a member of an underrepresented community in science, do feel free to contact me (see my details at the top of this page) if you want advice with application strategy or even just chat about life as a PhD student.

By the way, if you're considering different Universities to which to apply or aren't sure where you want to go, I encourage you to try U of T, the best research institution in Canada. So far, my experience has been nothing but positive here. There's life outside the US!

A SIGGRAPH first-timer's log

In the summer of 2018, while I was just an undergraduate student, I attended SIGGRAPH for the first time. This was my first time ever going to such a large-scale conference, and it impressed me so much I decided to write a log with my daily thoughts. It ended up being the experience that convinced me into studying Computer Graphics and pursuing my current PhD, and I still think of it as a motivation every now and then. Anyway, I've decided to archive this log here.