Physically-based simulation has become an important tool for a broad range of applications, including special effects for movies and games, virtual surgery, and computational biomechanics. In this talk, I will describe several simulation techniques for various solid and fluid phenomena, including rigid and soft bodies, multiphase incompressible flow, and their coupled interactions. I will then describe recent work in computational cell biology, where we use computational approaches to study cytoskeletal phenomena.

This talk consists of two interwoven stories. The Happy Story presents a technical solution to the problem of optimizing for cost instead of the more normal metric of duration. We describe a mechanism whereby the optimization problem is split into an evaluation component, where the projected cost of a schedule is evaluated using dynamic programming techniques, and a search component, where search is conducted in “window space” to find a cost-efficient schedule. The Sad Story explains what happens when you build a better mousetrap. The people beating a path to your door are the fat cats, who are reimbursed for their mouse catching on a cost-plus basis.