Žiga Kovačič

Žiga Kovačič

Undergraduate Student

Cornell University

Email | Google Scholar | GitHub

About Me

I am a junior studying Mathematics, CS, through the College Scholars program at Cornell University. At Cornell I'm fortunate to be advised by Kevin Ellis and Abe Davis,. I'm doing research at the intersection of graphics, physical simulation, and machine learning. I'm also a co-president of Cornell University Artificial Intelligence (CUAI).

Research Interests. I'm broadly interested in the intersection of computer graphics, physics, machine learning, and cognition. Currently I'm focusing on code generation for physical simulation and physically plausible re-simulations, i.e. finding useful representations as well as analysis methods that can extract from data not only object's shape but also their physical properties and dynamics.

I've recenly started writing summaries of my readings on physical simulation here.

Publications

* indicates equal contributions. See my Google Scholar page for an up-to-date list.

In Submission

Eric M. Chen, Žiga Kovačič, Madhav Agrawal, Abe Davis

Cool 2025 Project Page Paper Code

Projects

Here are some of my research and engineering projects, or at least the ones that are not being prepped for publications...

Image Space Modal Basis in JS and Python

Implements the 2015 paper "Image-Space Modal Bases for Plausible Manipulation of Objects in Video" by Davis et al., extending the original work with modal warping. Developed modal analysis pipeline in Python and custom JavaScript rasterizer for real-time rendering.

GitHub (Coming Soon)

Obstruction Removal - SliceSplatting

Modifies Gaussian Splatting to remove obstructions blocking the view of objects of interest in 3D scene reconstruction.

GitHub (Coming Soon)

Pen-2-Graph

Automates generation of node-edge graph programs from hand-drawn sketches using vision-language models and differential evolution. CS 6172 Final project.

GitHub Page Class Page

Gaussian Splatting Format Converter

Conversion script for .ply based viewers from Inria's 3DGS implementation params.npz format.

GitHub

MelodyMesh

3D music visualizer that deforms meshes based on audio frequencies. CS 6682 Final project.

GitHub Video

Personal

In my free time I enjoy cooking, climbing, and playing the guitar.

Personal websites of some friends/acquaintances you might find interesting: