People
Les A. Piegl
Professor
ENC 2501 | 813-974-5234
Biography
Dr. Les A. Piegl is professor of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of South Florida (USF) in Tampa, FL. He has been a visiting professor of Manufacturing Engineering at the City University of Hong Kong, a William Mong Visiting Research Fellow at the University of Hong Kong, an Alexander von Humboldt Research Fellow at the University of Braunschweig, and a senior software engineer at Structural Dynamic Research Corporation (SDRC). He received a teaching incentive award and an outstanding teaching award from the University of South Florida. Dr. Piegl's research interests are in computer-aided design and manufacturing, engineering and applied computing, software engineering and software system design, computer graphics, cyber-learning and engineering in medicine. His specialty is NURBS research and development in which he conducts basic research as well as commercial-grade software development. He worked on the systems of I-DEAS Master Series and on Nlib geometric modeling kernel.
His research has been funded by both national and international agencies, including the US National Science Foundation and the Hong Kong Research Council. His consulting experience on CAD/CAM includes organizations like SDRC, Prime Computer, Swanson Analysis Systems, and the Thai ICT Ministry. Dr. Piegl is the editor-in-chief of Computer-Aided Design and Applications, the past editor-in-chief of Computer-Aided Design, the general chair of the annual CAD conferences, and an advisory editor of The Visual Computer. He is the co-author of the standard text, The NURBS Book, published by Springer-Verlag. He widely lectured internationally in organizations like Samsung Electronics, Infosys, Tata Consulting Services, Sony Engineering Solutions, Honda R&D, Tsinghua and Peking Universities, Microsoft Beijing, and GE Shanghai.
Research Interests
Intelligent computing systems; engineering in medicine, bio-engineering; engineering and applied computing and numerical methods; software engineering and algorithms; E-learning and virtual enterprise modeling; computer graphics, geometric modeling and CAD
Teaching Interests
Software engineering; software testing; algorithms and data structures; computer graphics and visualization; geometric modeling and CAD
Education
PhD in Applied Computing, Eotvos University (1982)
MS in Mathematics, Eotvos University (1979)
Honors and Awards
- William Mong Research Fellow, The University of Hong Kong (2003)
- Alexander von Humboldt Research Fellow (1985 - 1987)
- Outstanding Undergraduate Teaching Award, University of South Florida
- Teaching Incentive Program Award, University of South Florida
Key Activities
- General Chair (CAD 2004 - CAD 2010, CAD 2015)
- Publications Chair (CAD 2011 - CAD 2014)
- Federation Chair, CAD+UAV (2008 - 2010)
- Editor-in-Chief, Computer-Aided Design (1991- 2005)
- Founding Editor-in-Chief, Computer-Aided Design and Applications (2004)
- Advisory Editor, The Visual Computer (2000)
- Member, Nomination Committee, The Japan Prize (1997)