3^rd International Conference on Computer Graphics & Animation November 07-09, 2016 Las Vegas, USA

Newton Lee is CEO of Newton Lee Laboratories LLC, president of the Institute for Education, Research, and Scholarships, adjunct professor at Woodbury University’s School of Media, Culture & Design, and editor-in-chief of ACM Computers in Entertainment. Previously, he was a computer scientist at AT&T Bell Laboratories, senior producer and engineer at The Walt Disney Company, and research staff member at the Institute for Defense Analyses. He was founder of Disney Online Technology Forum, creator of Bell Labs’ first-ever commercial AI tool, and inventor of the world’s first annotated multimedia OPAC for the U.S. National Agricultural Library. Lee graduated Summa Cum Laude from Virginia Tech with a B.S. and M.S. degree in Computer Science, and he earned a perfect GPA from Vincennes University with an A.S. degree in Electrical Engineering and an honorary doctorate in Computer Science. He is the co-author of Disney Stories: Getting to Digital; author of the Total Information Awareness book series including Facebook Nation and Counterterrorism and Cybersecurity; coauthor/editor of the Digital Da Vinci book series including Computers in Music and Computers in the Arts and Sciences; and editor-in-chief of the Encyclopedia of Computer Graphics and Games.

His research interest includes computer graphics, games, artificial intelligence, information science, and media technology

Professor Daniel Thalmann is Visiting Professor at NTU in the School of Computer Engineering; he is also the PhD coordinator at the Institute for Media Innovation (IMI). He has been Professor and Director of The Virtual Reality Lab (VRlab) at EPFL, Switzerland since 1988. His current research interests include Real-Tme Virtual Humans in Virtual Reality, crowd simulation, and 3D Interaction in Immersive Virtual Environments. Daniel Thalmann has been Professor at The University of Montreal and Visiting Professor/ Researcher at CERN, University of Nebraska, University of Tokyo, and National University of Singapore. He is coeditor-in-chief of the Journal of Computer Animation and Virtual Worlds, and member of the editorial board of 6 other journals including The Visual Computer and Frontiers in Robotics and A.I. Daniel Thalmann was member of numerous Program Committees, Program Chair and CoChair of several conferences including IEEE VR, ACM VRST, CGI, CASA, and ACM VRCAI. He has also organized courses at SIGGRAPH and SIGGRAPH ASIA on human animation and crowd simulation. Daniel Thalmann has published more than 500 papers in Graphics, Animation, and Virtual Reality. He is coeditor of 30 books, and coauthor of several books including 'Crowd Simulation' (second edition 2012) and 'Stepping Into Virtual Reality' (2007), published by Springer. He received his PhD in Computer Science in 1977 from the University of Geneva and an Honorary Doctorate (Honoris Causa) from University Paul- Sabatier in Toulouse, France, in 2003. He also received the Eurographics Distinguished Career Award in 2010 and the 2012 Canadian Human Computer Communications Society Achievement Award. Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Thalmann

Professor Daniel Thalmann's current research interests include real-time virtual humans in virtual reality, immersive virtual environments, crowd simulation, and multimodal interaction. He is also interested in applications in Cultural Heritage and Virtual Rehabilitation.

Susan Johnston, known as a Media Futurist, is President of Select Services Films, Inc. an award winning production company which is also certified DBE, has a casting division and is Founder/Director of New Media Film Festival. As a kid, Susan was on the set of the 1st Great Gatsby where she met Robert Redford while her father was handling the antique cars. From there, she worked on every production she could garnering experience in every department of filmmaking. Her first film a 35mm color film noir short Room 32 which won two awards, received distribution and was requested by Spiderman 3 for their production team. Susan founded the critically acclaimed New Media Film Festival ® in 2009 to honor stories worth telling in the ever changing landscape of media, New Media. Legendary judges cull over the content for the annual festival in Los Angeles that offers screening, competition ($45k in awards) and distribution opportunities. Currently there are over 600 titles in their library. Johnston has a background in the traditional film and TV industry, but has also become known in recent years as a pioneering new media producer including Stan Lee’s Comikaze Expo panel for Independent Creators, Co-Producing Feature Film Dreams Awake & currently producing the Marvel Comic feature Prey: Origin of the Species. While the Industry was changing from standard def to HD Johnston produced the 1stseries for mobile, Mini-Bikers the 1st live stream talk show on HD with a Panasonic Varicam and tested the Panasonic DVX100 which led to some changes on the DVX100A and was on a committee to develop the SAG Internet contract with Pierre Debs of SAG. Currently a Professor Emeritus in New Media, on New Media steering committee for The Caucus, an advisory board member for SET Awards (Entertainment Industry Council), Board Member Computer & Animation Society and Miss America NY judge. In 2012 LinkedIn announced Susan Johnston was one of the top 10% profiles looked at out of 20MM. With over 80,000 on the monthly newsletter elist and over 2 million across social media, Susan Johnston has been touted as a Social Media expert and lent her expertise to Los Angeles Social Media Week, IFFS, Jackson Hole Science Conference, Moviola, A Brasov Romania conference & is proud to have spoken at such high level conferences as American Film Market, NAB & NATPE about new advancements in the social media/crowd funding space. In November 2016, Susan will keynote the 3rd Annual Computer & Animation Expo in Vegas. Winner of Best Women Owned Film & TV Production Company CA 2016. Prior to relocating to Los Angeles in 2000, Susan Johnston, a New England native, worked with the Providence & Rhode Island Film Commissions over 5 years to build the infrastructure used by the Farrelly brothers, as well as by director Michael Corrente, NBC's hit TV series Providence, and the New England Screenwriters Conference. She developed Context Media Studios International production capabilities as well as garnered funds before Senate Committee hearings and helped facilitate the 25% tax incentive for investors of films in Rhode Island.

Multimedia, Computer Graphics & Games

Abdennour El Rhalibi is Professor of Entertainment Computing and Head of Strategic Projects at Liverpool John Moores University. He is Head of Computer Games Research Lab at the Protect Research Centre. He has over 22 years’ experience doing research and teaching in Computer Sciences. Abdennour has worked as lead researcher in three EU projects in France and in UK. His current research involves Game Technologies and Applied Artificial intelligence. Abdennour has been leading for six years several projects in Entertainment Computing funded by the BBC and UK based games companies, involving cross-platform development tools for games, 3D Web-Based Game Middleware Development, State Synchronisation in Multiplayer Online Games, Peer-to-Peer MMOG and 3D Character Animation. Abdennour has published over 150 publications in these areas. Abdennour serves in many journal editorial boards including ACM Computer in Entertainment and the International Journal of Computer Games Technologies. He has served as chair and IPC member in over 100 conferences on Computer Entertainment, AI and VR. Abdennour is member of many International Research Committees in AI and Entertainment Computing, including IEEE MMTC IG: 3D Rendering, Processing and Communications (3DRPCIG), IEEE Task Force on Computational Intelligence in Video Games and IFIP WG 14.4 Games and Entertainment Computing.

His main research interests lie in computer game technologies and applied artificial intelligence. He is currently leading several research projects involving Game 3-D Web-Based Game Middleware Development and Deployment, Game Based-Learning, State Synchronization in Multiplayer Online Games, Content Sharing in Virtual Environments, and Peer-to-Peer MMOG Deployment and Dynamic Interactive Storytelling. 

Athomas is a man of many skills and a veteran of the computer graphics industry. With over 20 years of experience as an artist, researcher, animator and director, Athomas is lending his animation and programming expertise to Shape of the World. Athomas is currently President at Lifelike & Believable Animation Design, Inc. and Founding Member of Pepper's Ghost Media & Performing Arts Collective and co-conspirator on a variety of side projects.

Bringing 20+ years experience in the interactive entertainment industry to provide creative and technical leadership and support to studios developing emotionally-engaging, character-driven games and experiences for console, PC and mobile platforms.

Gareth Edwards M.Sc. Ph.D. CEO: Dr. Edwards has 20 years experience bringing state-of-the-art technologies to the animation and medical industries, turning groundbreaking research into products and services which transform workflows. Working with Professor Chris Taylor FrEng OBE and Professor Tim Cootes, he invented the Active Appearance Model, one of the most widely used (for example in the Microsoft Kinect face tracker) and widely cited methods in the analysis of video and medical images, for which the team was awarded the Olympus Science for Life Prize and Dr. Edwards was personally awarded the Sullivan Prize. Edwards, Cootes and Taylor were also awarded the 2015 Test of Time Award at the IEEE Conference on Face and Gesture Recognition (IEEE Computer Society and IEEE Biometrics Council) for “one of the most influential papers in the field and inspired many (if not all) subsequent works on deformable models for face analysis.”

Dr. Edwards is a pioneer in the field of facial analysis and facial animation. He continues to lead the research and development of state-of-the-art algorithms and software platforms for complex model-based analysis of images, video and depth data, applicable to a large variety of the most challenging problems in computer vision.

Luca Fascione is Head of Rendering Research at Weta Digital, where he leads the activity of research around rendering algorithms and material modeling. He joined Weta in 2004 and has also worked at Pixar Animation Studios. The rendering group's software, including PantaRay and Manuka, has been supporting the realization of large scale productions such as Avatar, The Adventures of Tintin, the Planet of the Apes films and The Hobbit trilogy.

Main area of focus are high performance rendering, advanced material modeling, light transport algorithms, and geometric representation and compression.

Sebastian Sylwan is a renowned and respected Visual Effects and Digital Media Technology Executive. Sebastian is currently developing novel and exciting live action Virtual Reality experiences and the cameras, pipeline and tools to produce them with Montreal based Felix & Paul Studios, widely recognized as pioneers in this field and for having produced the highest quality experiences to date.

Visual Effects

I am now a principal researcher in Internet Graphics Group of Microsoft Research Asia . I obtained my Ph.D. degree in Computer Graphics from Tsinghua University in 1999. My Ph.D. thesis is about hardware assisted volume rendering. I got my B.S. Degree and Master Degree in Computer Science from Zhejiang University in 1993 and 1996 respectively.

My research interests include appearance modeling and rendering, texture synthesis, and image based modeling and rendering. Specifically, my research concentrates on studying the underline principles of material light interaction and light transport, and developing efficient methods for appearance modeling and rendering. I am also interested in performance capturing and facial animation.

Marco Corbetta (born May 26, 1977) is a game programmer, notable for his work in as lead programmer of Far Cry and Crysis franchise. Corbetta also wrote the 3D engine known as Equinox, before his time at Prograph Research, where he is credited for Tsunami 2265 (2002) (distributed in the US by Got Game Entertainment).

Over 14 years of professional game development experience ranging from the initial development of CryEngine/ FarCry, to directing large groups of engineers across multiple disciplines, platforms and studios, including the successful delivery of several AAA titles considered technically excellent.

Lauren Carr joins the Department of Art and Design as an Assistant Professor in the Animation/Illustration program. She has worked professionally for Disney Feature Animation, Cinesite, Sony Pictures Imageworks, and Dreamworks Animation. Some of her film projects include Tangled, Meet the Robinsons, Bolt, Chicken Little, The ChubbChubbs, X-Men United, Rio, and Ice Age 4. Prof. Carr was a (DEL: the) character simulation technical director at Blue Sky Studios and, prior to coming to Montclair State University, had taught for the School of Visual Arts in the Department of Computer Art, Computer Animation & Visual Effects.

Computer Animation & Visual Effects.

Professor David Xu is tenure associate professor at Regent University, specializing in computer 3D animation and movie special effects. He got MFA Computer Graphics in 3D Animation from Pratt Institute in NY. He has served as a senior 3D animator in Sega, Japan; a senior CG special effector in Pacific Digital Image Inc., Hollywood; and as a professor of animation in several colleges and universities where he developed the 3D animation program and curriculum. He has been a committee member of the computer graphics organization Siggraph where he was recognized with an award for his work. He published the book Mastering Maya: The Special Effects Handbook invited by Shanghai People\\\'s Fine Arts Publishing House.

3D Animation and special effects, Christian-themed, 3D movies

Leonel Toledo recieved his Ph.D from Instituto Tecnológico de Estudios Superiores de Monterrey Campus Estado de México in 2014, where he currently is a full-time professor. From 2012 to 2014 he was an assistant professor and researcher. He has devoted most of his research work to crowd simulation and visualization optimization. He has worked at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center using general purpose graphics processors for high performance graphics. His thesis work was in Level of detail used to create varied animated crowds.

His research interests include crowd simulation, animation, visualization and high-performance computing.

Ramahan Faulk serves as an Art Director for InReal. A talented traditional and digital artist, Ramahan enjoys sculpting and designing new, original characters. He has contributed to work on feature films, video games and live shows as an artist. He most recently worked on the “Virtual Teresa Teng” character for Digital Domain, which was shown in front of a live audience of 16,000 fans in Hong Kong. While at DD, Ramahan also worked on the feature film, Maleficent. Prior to that, he worked at Lucasfilm in Singapore, Crytek in Germany, and Weta Digital in New Zealand. It was at Weta that Ramahan worked on the main CG character, Jake, for James Cameron’s film, Avatar. He also worked as a modeler on the Academy Award winning short produced by Moonbot Studios, The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr Morris Lessmore. He created video game characters for Crysis 2, Heavenly Sword, NFL Street and Socom Navy Seals, and for the animated feature film from DNA, Ant Bully. While working at Reel FX in Dallas, he contributed to several commercial campaigns for Hasbro and other clients. Ramahan is a veteran of the United States Navy, where he served eight years as a Jet Engine Mechanic on Aircraft Carriers, and worked with the United States Marine Corps Helicopter Training Command as an aircrew/mechanic.

Video Games, Character Animation, 3D Modeling, Texturing, Visual Effects, Digital Sculpting, 3D Animation, Game Development, Facial Expressions

Dr. Ching Y. Suen is the Director of CENPARMI and the Concordia Chair on AI & Pattern Recognition. He received his Ph.D. degree from UBC (Vancouver) and his Master\\\'s degree from the University of Hong Kong. He has served as the Chairman of the Department of Computer Science and as the Associate Dean (Research) of the Faculty of Engineering and Computer Science of Concordia University. Prof. Suen has served at numerous national and international professional societies as President, Vice-President, Governor, and Director. He has given 45 invited/keynote papers at conferences and 195 invited talks at various industries and academic institutions around the world. He has been the Principal Investigator or Consultant of 30 industrial projects. His research projects have been funded by the ENCS Faculty and the Distinguished Chair Programs at Concordia University, FCAR (Quebec), NSERC (Canada), the National Networks of Centres of Excellence (Canada), the Canadian Foundation for Innovation, and the industrial sectors in various countries, including Canada, France, Japan, Italy, and the United States. Dr. Suen has published 4 conference proceedings, 12 books and more than 495 papers, and many of them have been widely cited while the ideas in others have been applied in practical environments involving handwriting recognition, thinning methodologies, and multiple classifiers. Dr. Suen is the recipient of numerous awards, including the Gold Medal from the University of Bari (Italy 2012), the IAPR ICDAR Award (2005), the ITAC/NSERC national award (1992), and the \\\"Concordia Lifetime Research Achievement\\\" and \\\"Concordia Fellow\\\" Awards (2008 and 1998 respectively). He is a fellow of the IEEE (since 1986), IAPR (1994), and the Academy of Sciences of the Royal Society of Canada (1995). Currently, he is the Editor-in-Chief of the journal of Pattern Recognition and an Adviser or Associate Editor of 5 journals.

Computational linguistics Computer analysis and recognition of documents

Dr. Ines Boaventura graduate at Mathematics from Sao Paulo State University , UNESP, Brazil, master’s at Computer Science and Computational Mathematics and Ph.D at Electrical Engineering from University of Sao Paulo (USP). She has experience in Computer Science, focusing on Graphical Processing (Graphics), and acting on the following subjects: Biometrics, Image Processing, and Computer Vision. She is a full-time professor and head of the Department at Department of Computer Science and Statistics at UNESP, campus of Sao Jose do Rio Preto, Sao Paulo, Brazil. In 2011-2012 she was a visiting researcher at PRIP Laboratory –CSE –Michigan State University.

Biometrics, Image Processing, and Computer Vision

Yongjoon Lee is a senior engineer at Bungie, focusing on building Destiny's animation and action systems among others. He published numerous research papers at SIGGRAPH and SIGGRAPH Asia as well as other conferences, until he graduated with a Ph.D degree from the University of Washington in 2010 and moved into video game industry full-time.

Animation

Dr. Ruck Thawonmas has been a Professor in the Department of Human and Computer Intelligence since its foundation in April, 2004. His work in artificial and computational intelligence has been widely recognized in a number of international academic journals, symposiums, and competitions.

Game AI, Games for Health, Virtual Worlds

Dr. Parberry received his PhD in 1984 from the University of Warwick in England. Twenty of his more than thirty years experience in academia are at the rank of Full Professor. He is author or coauthor of over 100 academic publications that include six books and over 75 articles (23 as sole author) in peer-reviewed journals, conferences, and workshops. Ian Parberry is a pioneer of academic game development education and research who began teaching game programming to undergraduates at UNT in 1993. The most famous alumnus of those classes is Jason West, co-founder of the Call of Duty franchise. Dr. Parberry's current research interests are clustered around game development, ranging from the procedural generation of game content to cognitive assessment of video gameplay using research methods from neuropsychology.

computer graphics, computer science education, data structures, design and analysis of algorithms, entertainment computing, fault-tolerant computing, game programming, game programming education, interconnection networks, load sharing, mathematical puzzles, mechatronics, packet routing, parallel computing, path planning, procedural content generation, philosophy of computing, randomized algorithms, real-time algorithms, robotics, software agents, sorting networks, video game cognitive assessment, and visualization of algorithms.

Angela Diamos has over 18 years of professional experience in the feature animation and live-action effects animation field. Angela has animated effects for Fantasia/2000, Tarzan, Hercules, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Atlantis: The Lost Empire, The Emperor’s New Groove, Star Trek, Battlestar Gallactica, Buck Rogers in the 25th Century and Quantum Leap. Angela is now channeling her talent into teaching and her personal work. Having realized the potential in video imagery, Angela now explores the use of video and digital imagery as an art medium.

Fine Art & Studio Art

Dr. Xiaopeng Zhang is a professor and a supervisor of PhD candidates in Sino French Lab in Computer Science, Automation and Applied Mathematics (LIAMA), and in National Laboratory of Pattern Recognition (NLPR), Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences. .He received his Ph.D. majoring in Computer Graphics in the State key Laboratory of Computer Science, Institute of Software, Chinese Academy of Sciences, in February 1999. He worked as a Post-doc follow of Pattern Recognition and Intelligent systems in Lab. of Complex Systems and Intellignece Science, Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences from March 1999 to March 2001.

Computer graphics, computer vison, digital geometry processing, and pattern recognition.

Kunihito Hoki,a Japanese chemist, computer scientist, and since 2010 Assistant Professor at the University of Electro-Communications. Kunihito Hoti received a D.Sc. in Chemistry from Tohoku University, and has been a research fellow at the University of Toronto as well as Tohoku University, where he then became Assistant Professor. As Shogi programmer, he is author of the strong Shogi program Bonanza.

Game Programming

I am passionate about reaching out to people with life-changing truth, through art, media, business and technology.Professionally, I create natural phenomena (fire, smoke, dust, fluids, rigid bodies, etc) that help sell that story in movies we watch and develop efficient scalable pipelines at Industrial Light and Magic, Lucasfilm. Some films I've worked on include: Pacific Rim, Marvel's The Avengers (Oscars Best VFX Nominee 2012, Transformers 3 (Oscars Best VFX Nominee 2011)

Vfx Programming Entrepreneurship Python Leadership Technology Computer Graphics Photography

Minhua Eunice Ma is Professor of Digital Media & Games in the School of Art, Design and Architecture at University of Huddersfield, and she is Director of Internationalisation and Acting Head of Department of Art & Communication. Professor Ma obtained her MSc in Computer Science from Newcastle University and PhD in Computer Science from Ulster University, and worked there as a Post-Doc Researcher on virtual reality games for stroke rehabilitation. She joined University of Derby as a Senior Lecturer in Computer Games Modelling and Animation in 2007 and was promoted to Reader in 2009. She was the Head of Academic Programmes at the Glasgow School of Art since 2010 and became a Professor of Computer Games Technology in 2013. She joined University of Huddersfield in September 2014. Professor Ma is a world-leading academic developing the emerging field of serious games. She has published widely in the fields of serious games for education, medicine and healthcare, Virtual and Augmented Reality and Natural Language Processing, in over 100 peer-reviewed publications, including 6 books on serious games with Springer. Eunice has received grants from RCUK, EU, NHS, NESTA, UK government, charities and a variety of other sources for her research on Virtual Reality and serious games for stroke rehabilitation, cystic fibrosis, autism, medical education and Holocaust education. As Director of Internationalisation, Professor Ma is responsible for leading the Internationalisation agenda for the School, contributing to the development and implementation of School Strategy in general and the Internationalisation strategy in particular, establishment and development of international teaching and research collaborations, bidding for funding and directing cultural change, coordinating international admissions and being responsible for international student experience in the School.

Digital games technology, serious games for education, medicine, and healthcare, 3D visualisation, medical visualisation, Virtual reality, Augmented Reality, HCI, embodied virtual humans, haptic interface, natural interface, Natural Language Processing, Computational Semantics

Yoshihiro Okada is currently designated as a Professor in the Kyushu University , Japan

3D Graphics and Computer Animation, Human Interface and Virtual Reality, Network Collaboration

Edmond Prakash is an Academic, Author, Editor and Researcher. He was appointed Professor in Computer Games Technology in the Department of Computer Science and Technology at University of Bedfordshire in 2010. As a visual computing expert, Edmond's research focus is on exploring the applications of visual computing across an unusually wide range of disciplines including engineering, business, science, medicine as well as in entertainment computing. He has worked on the design and implementation of walkthroughs of proposed structures, such as buildings, automobiles, and humans. In the process he has developed new algorithms for automatically generating object hierarchies, cinematic quality rendering, volume rendering, parallel computation, human modelling and animation for virtual environments. He has more than two hundred publications in academic journals, conferences and books and has worked extensively with companies including IBM, Microsoft, JP Morgan, and Silicon Graphics. He has also undertaken sponsored research funded by EPSRC and the industry. His first academic appointment was at the Supercomputer Centre at Indian Institute of Science as a Senior Scientific Officer. Subsequently, he was an Assistant Professor at Nanyang TechnologicalUniversity, Singapore, then as a Reader at Manchester Metropolitan University and now at University of Bedfordshire. He has an extensive international collaboration and has held visiting positions at NCSA, University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign, USA; CVC at State University of New York-Stony Brook, USA; Touch Lab, MIT, USA and Beijing Normal University, China.

Games Technology, Computer Graphics, Computer Animation, Interactive Digital Media, Computer Programming, Software Engineering

Marco Rocchetti is a registered professional Mechanical Engineer in Italy inscribed in the register of Engineers of Ancona. He is a 2006 graduate from the Università Politecnica delle Marche where he attained his bachelor’s degree in Mechanical Engineering with a specialization in energy and thesis entitled “Wind analysis in complex orography systems.” In 2007 he attend at Polytechnic of Milan and IUAV University of Venice for the RIDEF postgraduate Master Courses focused on “energy efficiency, renewable energy, energy context and decentralized planning.” Marco is a Certified Energy Manager (CEM) in Italy and has experience in various sectors of plant engineering, has previously worked for an ESCO and is expert in Energy Auditing development and technical economic feasibility studies for energy saving, especially in CHP and MCHP systems. He has also taught energy management courses at the Politecnico di Milano and has served as co-coordinator in research projects involving the prototyping of renewable technologies and patent drafting. His is competent in mechanical design with 3D CAD and Pro-Engineering.

Multimedia Technologies with Applications Health, Transportation and Entertainment, Media Art and Technology, Inclusive Digital Design for Multimedia

Zhigeng Pan received the bachelor’s and master’s degrees from the Computer Science Department at Nanjing University in 1987 and 1990, respectively, and the PhD degree in 1993 from Zhejiang University. He is the director of Digital Media and HCI Research Center in Hangzhou Normal University, and his research interests include HCI virtual reality, multimedia, and digital entertainment. He is the editor-in-chief of Transactions on Edutainment

Human Computer Interaction, Computer Graphics, Image Processing, Virtual Reality,Animation, Multimedia, Computer Animation,3D visualization, Rendering

Dr. Benjamin Kenwright (MEng,PhD,CEng,SFHEA,FBCS,SMIEEE) is the programme leader for the undergraduate and postgraduate games technology degrees at Edinburgh Napier University. He studied at Liverpool and Newcastle University before moving on to work in the game industry and eventually joining the Department of Computing at Edinburgh Napier University in February 2014.

His research interests include real-time systems, evolutionary computation, and interactive animation

Matthew Johnson has been a Professor of Graphic Design at the University of South Alabama for eleven years and a designer for nearly 20. He holds an MFA in Graphic Design from Louisiana Tech University, and is an internationally awarded designer, and published children’s book author and illustrator. Matthew’s experiences in the field, as well as the classroom, allow him to present confidently regarding topics of Graphic Design and computer arts. He lives for visual gratification and the ability to create. His world revolves around visual communication and the satisfaction that comes from a piece of work well done.

Graphic Design

Kyoung Lee Swearingen has worked in the film industry for the last decade on a variety of features and shorts including Ratatouille, Walle, UP, Cars 2, Toy Story 3, Brave, Monsters University, Presto, La Luna, The Blue Umbrella, Mater’s Tall Tales, Partly Cloudy, Ant Bully, and the Jimmy Neutron TV series. As a Technical Director of Lighting at Pixar Animation Studios, Kyoung focused on visual story-telling, mood, and look development through lighting. Her work has claimed numerous awards from the Academy Awards, BAFTA, Visual Effects Society, The American Film Institute, as well as many others. Kyoung received her M.F.A. from The Ohio State University, B. F. A from Savannah College of Art and Design, and B.S. in Chemistry from Sungshin Women\\\'s University in Seoul, Korea. Furthermore, she has taught at various institutes and universities throughout Korea and the United States, and is currently an Assistant Professor of Arts and Technology at UT Dallas.

Animation, Visual Effects

Sunil Thankamushy is a US based seventeen-year video game industry professional who was part of core teams that developed highly acclaimed, and successful video game franchises such as CALL OF DUTYâ„¢: FINEST HOURâ„¢, MEDAL OF HONORâ„¢ etc. A graduate of UCLA, Sunil was hired by DreamWorks Interactive studio as one of its first animators. After seven years of working at DreamWorks Interactive, and later Electronic Arts, he joined hands with other game veterans to co-found Spark Unlimitedâ„¢, a game studio based in Los Angeles. Five years after its inception, Spark has a long body of work that includes helping launch the now multi-billion dollar CALL OF DUTYâ„¢: FINEST HOURâ„¢ franchise, TURNING POINTâ„¢: FALL OF LIBERTYâ„¢, LEGENDARYâ„¢, LOST PLANET 3â„¢ etc. Blending technology and animation has been a passion for Sunil. In every stage of his career, he has successfully created animation paradigms and technology to improve the level of immersion in the virtual environment of the game, and heighten the experience of realism for the player. After shipping more than 8 video game titles, Sunil decided to change his life direction and set up DEEPBLUE Worlds Inc, a knowledge-based games studio to make innovative products for children. His most current product is an Augmented Reality based mobile app called, DINO ON MY DESK. Sunil recently joined Mt.San Antonio College, Walnut, California. as professor of gaming and animation. He lives with his wife Diana, and 2 children in beautiful San Diego, California.

Animation, Game Design & Develpment

Will Kim is a Tenured Associate Professor of Art at Riverside City College and a Los Angeles based artist. Kim is a founder and director of RCC Animation Showcase. Kim received an M.F.A. in Animation from UCLA and a BFA in Character Animation from CalArts (California Institute of the Arts). Before teaching at RCC, he also taught at CalArts, Community Arts Partnership and Sitka Fine Arts Camp as a media art instructor. Kim’s work has showed in over 100 international film/animation festivals and auditoriums including Directors Guild of America (DGA) Theater, Academy of TV Arts and Sciences Theater, The Getty Center, The USC Arts and Humanities Initiative, and Museum of Photographic Arts San Diego. As an animation supervisor and a lead animator, Will has participated in various feature and short live action films that were officially selected for the New York Times’ Critic’s Pick, the United Nations’ climate change conference (Framework Convention), Los Angeles Film Festival, Tribeca Film Festival, and Cannes.

Film-making, Animation

Since March 2015, I perform researches in Visual Computing in Innsbruck as post-doctoral researcher. Previously, I received a Sc.B. in Computer Science from University Claude Bernard Lyon 1, a M.S. in Computer Science with Honors from INSA-Lyon, University Claude Bernard Lyon 1 and Ecole Centrale of Lyon, France. In 2012, I obtained a phd degree from University of Bordeaux (France) with summa cum laude, without supervisors. In addition, I was teaching assistant at University of Bordeaux from 2009 to 2011. I was temporary teaching assistant at ENSEIRB engineering school. I was visiting researcher at University of Porto in Portugal from March to May 2013 and IT Porto. In 2013, I joined Ben Gurion University of the Negev (in Israel) and Shenzhen Institutes of Advanced Technology - Shandong University (in China) as post-doctoral researcher. I'm member of ACM, ACM SIGGRAPH since 2009, and Eurographics from 2009 to 2012. As PhD student, I was quadruple-time single-author of peer-reviewed publications, including three contributions at ACM Siggraph level. More importantly, I was honored to serve our community as reviewer for a large scope of well-established interactive computing conferences and journals like Eurographics, Graphics Interface, ISMAR, SIGGRAPH, VR, CHI, PGV, SUI, GraphiCon 2013, SIGGRAPH ASIA, TOG, PLOS ONE, Optica Applicata, TVCG, CVPR and so long.

My research interests lie in the field of Computer Graphics, Computer Vision and Digital Fabrication; in particular, I devote efforts on techniques for video-based performance capture, mesh tracking, character rigging and skinning, mocap, geometric modeling, mesh deformation, captured animation, non-rigid time-varying scenes reusing, and non-photorealistic animation. My research work is dedicated to develop vision-based graphics toward 3D cinematography, and designed to bring easy-to-use tools.

Waqas Hussain has completed his Bachelor’s degree from Air University, Islamabad. His research paper managed to attain 3rd position in the The International Conference on Energy Systems and Policies (ICESP-2014). He developed 3D-Model for World Wide Fund an UK based organization. He presented his research papers in different international research based conferences (Turkey, Dubai and Pakistan). Currently, we have minimum one million hospitals all over the world but none of them have an application catering to sperm morphology. So, now, he is working on this idea using Computer Graphics and Computer Vision algorithms.

Computer Graphics and Computer Vision algorithms.

A K Madhavan, the Chief Executive Officer of Crest Animation Studios Limited is credited with opening the doors for Indian Animation in the intensely competitive and demanding CGI products and services global market. Madhavan has a Masters in Sales & Marketing, and has decades of experience in Sales & Marketing in the IT Industry in addition to Brand Building & Advertising. Madhavan is committed to ensuring that India is considered as a High on Value Destination for CGI products and Services in the global CGI space. He leads the Indian Animation Industry in all the government forums including NASSCOM, FICCI etc.

Animation