SINTEF, the Norwegian Foundation for Industrial and Technical Research,

is a multidisciplinary organization that finds intelligent, profitable solutions based on research and development in technology, the natural sciences, medicine and the social sciences. Technology for a better society is SINTEF's vision. SINTEF is Scandinavia's largest independent research organisation with about 1700 employees, of whom around 70% are researchers. Contracts for industry and the public sector generate more than 90% of the income. SINTEF collaborates closely with the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim and the University of Oslo.

The about 40 employees of the Department of Applied Mathematics within SINTEF ICT (Institute of Information and Communication Technology) perform contract research, development and consultancy for industry and system vendors. The department is involved in numerous activities ranging from basic research to product and software development and commercialization.

The geometry group within the department concentrates on the modelling and representation of geometry found in CAD/CAM, GIS (Geographical Information Systems), medicine, geology, animation, CAD to FEM integration, ocean wave modelling, and industrial quality control. Many industrial projects use the department's own commercially available software libraries that have extensive functionalities within their respective fields of curve and surface modelling and scattered data approximation, the pertinent knowhow having been gathered since the early 1980's. Some of the most recent research projects concern:

• visualization of medical data
• mathematical methods in mesh-based geometric modelling
• bridging the gap between algebraic geometry and computer-aided design
• use of graphics co-processors as high-end computational resources

The department is an active partner in the Centre of Excellence "Centre of Mathematics for Applications" at the University of Oslo. Within this centre, both geometry problems related to product development and manufacturing, as well as gridding for simulations and partial differential equation based simulations will be central topics. The department is also a main partner in the Oslo Graphics Lab, a joint visualization research facility of the University of Oslo and the Simula Research Laboratory.

Role of SINTEF within AIM@SHAPE

A main goal of the AIM@SHAPE project is for SINTEF to make the research results in the consortium available to its customer base, thus initiating industrial projects or supporting existing ones. Of special importance is in our view the Digital Shape Workbench, allowing access to software that took years to develop. The main areas of our own research and industrial activity are CAD/CAM, where we feel new approaches are needed to overcome current inertia; medical applications for the visualization of data and the simulation of operations for training purposes; the combination of geometric modelling and numerical simulation, for example in shipbuilding; the handling of geological data from the oil and gas industry; animation for game and film production. For these applications (and others) there is special interest in new geometry representations and the conversion between different representations, in the scaling of shape information to different platforms (such as PDAs) and available hardware (such as graphics co-processors), as well as in multimodal approaches combining geometry and haptics (i.e. force and tactile feedback involving the sense of touch).