Xiaobai Chen will present his preFPO on Tuesday November 29 at 11:40am in Room 302. The members of his committee are: Thomas Funkhouser, advisor; Szymon Rusinkiewicz and Dan Goldman (Adobe), readers; Adam Finkelstein and David Dobkin, nonreaders. Everyone is invited to attend his talk. His abstract follows below. Title: Learning from people about how to analyze 3D meshes Abstract: Increasing amounts of 3D data from computer graphics to geospatial information systems to computational biology keeps pushing the front of shape analysis, from analysis of local geometries, to analysis of global properties, and to shape understanding. This thesis aims to advance shape understanding by learning from people: two problems are studied, one to understand how people decompose meshes into meaningful parts, and the other to investigate mesh salience in the social context. These studies not only have influenced geometry processing tasks like mesh segmentation and salient feature detection, but also have driven the development of new analysis tools: this thesis will introduce symmetry factored embedding and distance as a new method to characterize symmetry correspondences, and MeshMatch as a tool to transfer properties from studied models to unseen models.