ALICE is one of the four teams of the Image Geometry and Computation group in INRIA Nancy Grand-Est / Loria.

ALICE is an INRIA project-team that aims at studying some fundamental aspects of Computer Graphics. More specifically, we study the interaction of light with the geometry of the objects. The lighting problem consists in designing accurate and efficient numerical simulation methods for the light transport equation. The geometrical problem consists in developing new solutions to transform and optimize geometric representations. Our original approach to both issues is to restate the problems in terms of numerical optimization. We try to develop solutions that are provably correct, scalable and numerically stable.

• By provably correct, we mean that some properties/invariants of the initial object need to be preserved by our solutions.
• By scalable, we mean that our solutions need to be applicable to data sets of industrial size.
• By numerically stable, we mean that our solutions need to be resistant to the degeneracies often encountered in industrial data sets.

To reach these goals, our approach consists in transforming the physical or geometric problem into a numerical optimization problem, studying the properties of the objective function and designing efficient minimization algorithms.

Besides Computer Graphics, we have cooperations with researchers and people from the industry, who experiment applications of our general solutions to various domains, comprising CAD, industrial design, oil exploration, plasma physics... We collaborate with the Gocad consortium on 3D modeling for oil exploration.