The SIAM International Meshing Roundtable Workshop 2026 is pleased to announce the following plenary talks to appear at this year’s conference.
- Prof. Alla Sheffer, University of British Columbia
Explainable Geometric Algorithms - Prof. Helmut Pottmann, TU Vienna
Design and Optimization of Meshes in Architecture - Dr. Frederic Alauzet, Inria Saclay
Metric-based Anisotropic Mesh Adaptation: The New Age of Meshing in Computational Fluid Dynamics
Prof. Alla Sheffer
Explainable Geometric Algorithms
Abstract: TBD
Biography: Alla Sheffer is a Professor of Computer Science at the University of British Columbia. She received her BSc (1991), MSc (1995), and PhD (2000) from Hebrew University, Jerusalem, Israel. She investigates algorithms for geometry processing, focusing on computer graphics applications. She is particularly interested in leveraging connections between geometry and perception to enable users to create and manipulate geometric content, including garments and 3D printable artifacts. Prof. Sheffer regularly publishes at selective computer graphics venues, including ACM TOG, SIGGRAPH and SIGGRAPH Asia proceedings. She holds multiple patents on methods for garment grading, sketch analysis, and hexahedral mesh generation. Sheffer is a Fellow of IEEE, a Fellow of ACM, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, a Fellow of Eurographics, and a Member of the SIGGRAPH Academy. She is the recipient of the 2018 Canadian Human Computer Communications Society Achievement Award; a UBC Killam Research Award; multiple faculty awards from Adobe, Google and IBM; an NSERC Discovery Accelerator award; and an Audi Production Award. She was the Technical Papers Committee Chair for SIGGRAPH’23 and co-chaired the program committees for Eurographics’18, 3DV’18, PG’19, SGP’06 and IEEE SMI’13. She has served on the editorial boards of ACM TOG, IEEE TVCG, Computer Graphics Forum, Graphical Models, Computers & Graphics, and CAGD.
Prof. Helmut Pottmann
Design and Optimization of Meshes in Architecture
Abstract: Meshes in architecture are often part of the design and thus both their visual appearance and functional aspects such as structural stability and the cost-effective fabrication play an important role. The present talk provides an overview of work in architectural geometry with a focus on meshes. Basic structures are quad meshes with planar faces, in particular nearly rectangular ones. They also occur in discrete differential geometry, and their relation to special parameterizations of surfaces is essential for the approximation of given reference surfaces with such meshes. Computational design of architectural meshes includes functional aspects such as static equilibrium, the geometry of the supporting structure and the use of simple long-range elements which facilitate fabrication. We will also elaborate on the close relations to contemporary research in geometry and illustrate the successful usage of architectural geometry research in real projects.
Biography: Helmut Pottmann is a professor emeritus of applied geometry at TU Vienna. He has had faculty positions in the US, in Germany and at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology in Saudi Arabia, where he has been founding director of the Visual Computing Center. His research interests are in applied geometry, classical geometry and discrete differential geometry with a focus on applications in architecture, computational design and fabrication. His work in architectural geometry has also found its way into real projects such as the Eiffel Tower Pavilions and the Museum of Islamic Art in the Louvre in Paris, or the Yas Island Marina Hotel in Abu Dhabi. He is a Fellow of SIAM and received the Eurographics Outstanding Technical Contributions Award and the Bezier Award of the Solid Modeling Association.
https://www.geometrie.tuwien.ac.at/geom/ig/pottmann/
Dr. Frederic Alauzet
Metric-based Anisotropic Mesh Adaptation: The New Age of Meshing in Computational Fluid Dynamics
Abstract: This presentation will demonstrate the impact of anisotropic mesh adaptation for turbulent flow (RANS) simulations. First, we will quickly present each step of the mesh-adaptive solution platform and how, in practice, it is implemented and all the advantages of doing it in this way (multigrid type effect, free convergence study, …). Then, we will detail the considered error estimates and robust mesh operators to generate such adapted meshes. The key point is to propose robust numerical methods that are compatible with extreme anisotropy, i.e. element ratios of 1:100000. High-lift applications and vortex dominated flows in aeronautics will be considered to emphasize the efficiency of anisotropic mesh adaptation to achieve automation, error-consistent results and mesh convergence which is a necessary first step towards the certification of numerical solutions.
Biography: Frederic Alauzet is senior researcher at Inria Saclay and head of the Inria GammaO team. He is also adjunct professor at Mississippi State University and scientific expert at Safran. In 2022, he became AIAA Fellow for his contributions in developing advanced meshing methods to enhance fidelity in numerical simulations, including anisotropic mesh adaptation techniques to generate the optimal meshes for a given computation. He also made several contributions in the error estimation theory and numerical schemes to solve the Navier-Stokes equations.
