B1 rating awarded to Professor Gain
Professor James Gain, of the Department of Computer Science, has been awarded a prestigious B1 rating by the National Research Foundation (NRF). This rating is given to researchers who are internationally recognised by their peers for the high quality and impact of their recent research outputs.
Gain’s research is primarily focused on the computer science domains of computer graphics, virtual reality, human-computer interaction, and visualisation, with cross-disciplinary application. Within computer graphics his focus is on procedural and geometric modelling as a means of empowering computer animators to create natural scenes and objects more effectively, including terrain, plant ecosystems, and weather. In the area of virtual reality his expertise is in health and wellbeing applications, with a particular focus on emotion elicitation. Similarly, with respect to visualization, he is interested in the visualization of computational science datasets, in fields such as astronomy and geomatics.
He received a Master of Science with distinction from Rohes University in 1995, before obtaining a PhD from the University of Cambridge in 2000 entitled "Enhancing Spatial Deformation for Virtual Sculpting". In that same year he started work at UCT. He has received numerous accolades and awards, including UCT’s Distinguished Teacher Award in 2014 that recognised the many innovations he has introduced into his teaching, such as a cost-effective method of checking responses to multiple-choice questions in class, based on images captured on a cell phone; course gamification, in which elements of games are incorporated to encourage engagement and active learning; and automatic assessment of algorithms so that students receive immediate feedback.
As with many computer scientists, he was inspired to enter the field by early efforts at programming, initially creating his first computer game in 1984 in Basic on a ZX Spectrum and later working on rudimentary rendering of terrains. While most people associate computer graphics with its use in film visual effects and computer games, and this is certainly an important application area, it is also a field that has a multi-disciplinary impact through visualization on a broad range of scientific disciplines. It is this broad range of application areas and the underpinnings of applied mathematics and human-centric computing that has most informed Gain’s research.
His future research plans include an interactive exploration of climate change through virtual reality. “Our ultimate plan is to develop the Climate Horizon, a system for viscerally experiencing climate change that will allow non-technical users to alter climate parameters and interactively explore the consequences, including entering a virtual environment that displays through multi-sensory input at human scale the combined biosphere, hydrosphere, atmosphere, and anthroposphere for a chosen location. We envisage this as a museo-graphic installation that will assist in educating and informing participants about climate change.”