Rate My Professor Michael Shafae

Michael Shafae is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at California State University, Fullerton, in the College of Engineering and Computer Science, a position he has held since joining the faculty as an Assistant Professor in 2007. He served as Chair of the Department of Computer Science from 2015 to 2018. Shafae earned his Ph.D. in Information and Computer Science from the University of California, Irvine in 2007, with a dissertation titled "A General Cost Model for Sort-First Parallel Graphics Processing," advised by Renato Pajarola; an M.S. in Information and Computer Science from UCI in 2002; a B.S. in Computer Science from the University of California, Santa Cruz in 1999; and a B.A. in Politics from UC Santa Cruz in 1999. Before his academic career, he held industry positions including Software Engineer at Sun Microsystems (1998-1999), Intern at Sun Labs (Summer 2000), and contractor roles at Banzai Research and University of California, Irvine Network & Academic Computing (2007).

His research interests focus on computer graphics, including parallel rendering, tiled displays, graphics clusters, level-of-detail rendering, geometric modeling, visualization, and large-scale displays; he also explores computer games. Notable publications include "DStrips: Dynamic Triangle Strips for Real-Time Mesh Simplification and Rendering" (Proceedings of Pacific Graphics 2003, with Renato Pajarola), "SMART: An Efficient Technique for Massive Terrain Visualization from Out-of-core" (Proceedings of Vision, Modeling and Visualization 2004, with Xiaohong Bao and Renato Pajarola), "Large Displays for Collaborative Visualization" (Proceedings of Thirty Seventh Annual Meeting of Western Decision Science Institute 2008), "An Application of Motion Control and Motion Planning" (Proceedings of International Conference of Computing in Engineering, Science and Information 2009, with Thomas Joy), and "Your Neighbors' Biz: Measuring Trust Relationships in Online Cottage Industries" (ISAST Transactions on Computers and Intelligent Systems 2010, with Murtaza Virji and xtine burrough). He has presented posters at IEEE Visualization (2003, 2004) and contributed SIGGRAPH student reports (2005-2008). Shafae has secured grants such as EPOCHS Phase I and II (2010-2011), Accessible Technology Initiative Grant (2010), and Intramural Jr./Sr. Research Grant (2009). Awards include the Donald Bren School of ICS Distinguished Student Award (2007) and Paul Butterworth Student Award ($4,000, 2007). He has served as Faculty Advisor for the CSUF Video Game Design Club (2007-2012), on department and senate committees, and as session chair at conferences including ICCEIS 2009 and WDSI 2007.