Featured Speakers

Ed Catmull
President, Walt Disney and Pixar Animation Studios
Monday, 11 August, 1:30 pm

Managing the Creative Environment
Since the late 1970s, Ed Catmull, a pioneer in the entertainment and film industry and co-founder of Pixar Animation Studios, has played a major role in the invention of some of the most fundamental computer graphics practices used throughout the motion picture industry.

He is one of the original architects of the RenderMan rendering software system, which has been used to create some of the world's best known animated hits, including "Toy Story" and "Finding Nemo." And he has founded three of the world's most renowned computer graphics research centers, including the computer graphics laboratory at the New York Institute of Technology and the computer division of both Lucasfilm, Ltd. and Pixar Animation Studios.

He has received four Academy Awards, and he has been nominated for 44 of the last 47 visual effects awards presented by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. In 1993, he was awarded ACM SIGGRAPH's Steven A. Coons Award, honoring his lifetime contributions to the computer graphics industry.

Catherine Owens
Artist/Director
Tuesday, 12 August, 1:30 pm

Giving Technology Emotion: From the Artist's Mind to "U2 3D"
Irish artist/director Catherine Owens creates installations that evolve through painting, sculpture, photography, sound, and video. She is well known for her collaboration with the Irish band U2 on their last four world tours. She co-directed "U2 3D," a documentary of the band's live performance in South America on their 2006 Vertigo tour. "U2 3D" is the first live-action feature-length 3D digital theatrical release.

In 2005, she directed U2's "Original of The Species" video, which explored CG motion capture technology. She has also created and directed visual content and animation for the San Francisco-based group Kronos Quartet and for the Chinese Pipa player Wu Man. Owens is currently working on a new body of drawings and creating content for the next U2 album and tour.

Takeo Kanade
Professor of Computer Science and Robotics, and Director of the Quality of Life Technology Engineering Research Center, Carnegie Mellon University
Thursday, 14 August, 1:45 pm

My Personal Take on the Last 30 Years in Robotics and Vision
Takeo Kanade works in many aspects of robotic science: computer vision, multimedia, manipulators, autonomous mobile robots, medical robotics, and sensors. He has written more than 250 technical papers and reports in these areas, and holds more than 15 patents. He has been the principal investigator of more than a dozen major vision and robotics projects at Carnegie Mellon. He is also the director of the Digital Human Research Center in Tokyo. He has received many awards, including the Franklin Institute Bower Prize, the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society Pioneer Award, and the Japan Society of Artificial Intelligence Career Accomplishment Award.