Tomasz is Director of Visualisation at the EPICentre, Team Leader at CSIRO Data61 and Chair of SIGGRAPH Asia 2019. His roles reflect his conviction to a holistic approach to the wicked problems facing the collation, analytics and display of big data. His approach is expansive and encompasses the use of novel technologies (AR, VR, MR, CAVE, Dome, AVIE), often in combination. Over the last couple of years, he has been involved in wide range of projects in area of immersive visualisation, human-computer interaction, computational imaging, visualisation, and simulations, computer graphics, games, computational fluid dynamics, demoscene.
Dio is the Engineering Director for Mixed Reality (MR) avatar services at Microsoft. She holds a master’s degree from Purdue University, where she was involved in collaborative Virtual Reality (VR) research for CAVE™-like systems. As a lecturer at Singapore’s Nanyang Polytechnic, she specialized in future immersive technologies, and later as a research scientist at University of Louisiana she conducted R&D for a large scale VR framework for the US Army Research Laboratory. She worked 5 years in the animated film industry at Pixar and DreamWorks Animation, and before joining Microsoft she spent 2 years at Unity Labs conducting VR and MR research.
Mike Jutan is a veteran of Alias|Wavefront and Pixar Animation Studios. At Industrial Light & Magic (ILM), his current work includes integrating Virtual Reality and Mixed Reality technologies into Virtual Production workflows. Mike’s specialties also include Animation and Rigging, including the development of the BlockParty2 visual procedural rigging system— first presented at Siggraph 2013 and for which Mike was honored with an Academy Scientific and Technical Award in 2018. Mike’s credits include: Ratatouille, Wall-E, The Avengers, Noah, Transformers: Age of Extinction, Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, and Carne Y Arena (with ILMxLAB).
June Kim is a media arts practitioner-researcher who currently teaches at the Sydney University and undertakes PhD at the University of New South Wales Art & Design, Sydney, Australia. Her current research in Virtual Reality (VR) is to investigate the ways VR can challenge the dichotomous relationship between subject and object that still determines relationship amongst humans and between humans and non-humans in contemporary society as an extension of her participants in the conversation virtual reality research project – Many Eyes on the Wild (Amazon, Peru). With passion in implementing innovative interfaces and technologies as interdisciplinary place to reflect and discourse, she organises collaborative media art-science galleries and symposiums in different cities. Previous events were held in EPICentre-UNSW (Sydney), The Cube-QUT (Brisbane), Media Art Nexus, NTU (Singapore). Her works and talks were presented in various conferences and festivals including SIGGRAPH, SIGGRAPH Asia, FMX, ISEA, OZVIZ SAS, Seoul Creative, VRCAI and Web3D.
Aleissia is a game programmer and designer who has been working as a developer for 16 years and developing games at Ubisoft for 10 of them. She was Lead AI on multiple ‘Assassin’s Creed’ games. Her passion for design has pushed her teams to think about why they are developing their games rather than just how they develop them. She empowers her teams to think outside of the box through game jams and experimentation. Recently she has made the jump from video games to Mixed Reality, joining Magic Leap as Interaction Director for their new San Francisco office. There, her team focuses on finding new and innovative ways to create rich immersive experiences focused on player interaction and narrative.
Scott Peterson is the Director of Interactivity at Baobab studios. He adds dimension to storytelling by building interactive worlds, as seen in “Crow the Legend,” and “Asteroids”. As an indie game developer, he developed and released the mobile game, “Shazap: Match Draw” in 2017. During his tenure at Zynga before that, he received a People’s Choice award for his work on Farmville, Tropic Escape. Scott served as Head of Effects at DreamWorks Animation for 18 years. He received an Academy Award for technical achievement in 2015 for developing the DreamWorks Animation Foliage System. In addition to supervising effects on four films, including Madagascar 2 and 3, Scott wrote and directed an award-winning animated short Sprout. He graduated from Cal Poly in 1997 with a BS in computer science and an art minor. He resides in Mountain View, California, with his wife and their two children.
Tom Sanocki is the Interactivity & Realtime Engineering Manager at Lytro. Previously he was CEO & Founder of Limitless Ltd (acquired by Lytro), the Virtual Reality (VR) interactive character platform that powered Gary the Gull, Reaping Rewards, and interactive characters on High Fidelity. Tom also spent 11 years as a Character Lead at Pixar, where he built characters & technology on films from Finding Nemo through Good Dinosaur, filed 5 patents, and won a VES award. Tom was a Character & Cinematics Tech Art Lead at Bungie, where he led five character technology teams on Destiny. He has multiple presentations at SIGGRAPH and GDC, and graduated with a CS Engineering degree from Princeton University.
Stephan is a Software Engineer in the Story/Editorial software group at Pixar Animation Studios, where he builds Virtual Reality (VR) tools and does VR research. He also contributes to Pixar’s open source OpenTimelineIO project. Prior to VR he has a background in pipeline development and building shading and lighting tools.
Yun-Ta Tsai is a senior software engineer at Google, working on high performance image processing on mobile devices, and color tuning. Prior to Google, Yun-Ta Tsai was a senior research scientist at NVIDIA and a senior researcher at Nokia. He received M.Sc. from University of Southern California. His research interest includes computational photography, high performance computing, computer architecture and mixed reality. He has published his work in diversified venues from VLSI to SIGGRAPH, and enjoyed working with people from various disciplines.
In Vancouver, I fell in love with the people that make up SIGGRAPH; a group of people that enthusiastically support and cheer each other on in the development of ever greater graphics and interactive techniques year after year.
I met tons of people; all different kinds, all different skills and skill levels ... it kind of dawned on me that this wasn't an impossible dream career.
Not only is the Computer Animation Festival is amazing, it’s also inspiring to be a part of an industry and community that’s very supportive of each other.
My friend keeps saying that I go to SIGGRAPH for my annual energy shot.
SIGGRAPH is what you think it is, and more. It opens the door to what I want to do with my life.
I've connected with and befriended so many people through SIGGRAPH. Even if we don't get to talk much throughout the year, it's crazy how we see each other at SIGGRAPH and pick up right where we left off.
The thing that strikes me the most is the inspiration, learning and friendship that I derive out of these SIGGRAPH conferences.