We have the pleasure to welcome Pr James Gain (Cape Town) for a LIRIS seminar around the authoring of digital terrains in room C5 in Nautibus, on Friday, July 1st, at 10am. Abstract: Simulated natural phenomena, including terrain, river networks, ecosystems, and weather effects, are an essential feature in many games, films, and virtual environments. However, creating such scenes using a traditional geometric modelling pipeline places a considerable burden on digital artists. In this talk two case studies in ecosystem and weather modelling will be presented to support the contention that in building more effective modelling frameworks the focus should be on a balance of visual plausibility, computational efficiency and authoring control. Furthermore, the best way to achieve this is through a mix of procedural, simulation and data-driven approaches, coupled with sketching and painting interfaces with which digital artists have a natural familiarity. Bio: Prof James Gain is a Professor of Computer Science at the University of Cape Town, South Africa. He received his BSc(Hons) and MSc degrees in Computer Science from Rhodes University, South Africa, in 1994 and 1996, respectively. In 2000 he obtained his PhD entitled “Enhancing Spatial Deformation for Virtual Sculpting” from the University of Cambridge. He is a former president of the African Computer Graphics Association (Afrigraph) and a winner of the University of Cape Town Distinguished Teacher’s Award. Prof Gain's research is primarily focused on the computer science domains of computer graphics, high-performance computing, human-computer interaction, virtual reality and visualization, with cross-disciplinary application. Within computer graphics he focuses on procedural and geometric modelling as a means of empowering computer animators to create natural scenes and objects more effectively. In the area of high-performance computing his expertise is in accelerating computational science problems using graphical processing units, with a particular focus on radio astronomy. Similarly, with respect to visualization, he is interested in the visualization of computational science datasets, in fields such as astronomy, geomatics and computational chemistry.