Bill Polson will be speaking about design patterns in computer graphics at BA 1210 on October 22. The talk begins at 7pm, but doors will open at 6:45.

BIO

Bill is currently on leave from Pixar, working on a book on Pipeline Design Patterns, which should be out in mid-2016. At Pixar, Bill was the Director of Industry Strategy, where he was responsible for Pixar’s relationship to the graphics industry. In this role he has shaped the product roadmaps of major graphics software vendors. He is the originator of Pixar’s OpenSubdiv effort, which is redefining how the industry handles high order geometry. Bill has had a number of management roles at Pixar, including Lead of Production Engineering, and Supervising Technical Director of Short Films. Prior to that Bill was a TD and software developer. Bill is active in SIGGRAPH, where he originated the popular new program SIGGRAPH Dailies!

TITLE

Pipeline Design Patterns

ABSTRACT

In his talk, Bill will use a simple example to illustrate the common problems of graphics pipelines: getting assets built (in lots of variations), getting them converted to optimized representations and aggregated into shots and levels, and generally carrying edits from modeling through to animation/gameplay and beyond to rendering/display. The talk will discuss the general shape of these problems and their solutions, and will propose some common vocabulary.

On October 13th, MaRS Discovery District will welcome Hrvoje Benko, who will be presenting at TUX. Lunch reception begins at 12:30pm in the Auditorium and the lecture at 1:00pm. Anyone interested in attending should RSVP via email with Grace Chen at gchen@dgp.toronto.edu.

BIO

Hrvoje Benko is a Senior Researcher at Microsoft Research. He explores novel interactive computing technologies and their impact on human-computer interaction. In particular, his research interests include augmented reality, touch and gesture-based interfaces, depth sensing, and display technologies. He helped found and lead the Microsoft Touch Mouse project and he has extensively collaborated with the Surface Computing group at Microsoft. He has been active in the human-computer interaction field, authoring more than 50 scientific papers and journal articles, as well as serving as the General Chair (2014) and the Program Chair (2012) of the ACM Conference on User Interface Systems and Technology (UIST). For his publications, he received several best paper awards at both ACM UIST and ACM SIGCHI. Before joining Microsoft, he obtained his PhD at Columbia University. More detail can be found on his website:http://research.microsoft.com/~benko/.