PITTSBURGH—Ed Catmull, president of Walt Disney and Pixar Animation Studios, will accept the first Randy Pausch Prize from Carnegie Mellon University’s Entertainment Technology Center (ETC) and present the keynote address at the 7th International Conference on Entertainment Computing (ICEC) on Sept. 26.
The award, which the ETC plans to present annually, is named for Randy Pausch, a Carnegie Mellon computer scientist and author of the best-selling book “The Last Lecture,” who died July 25 at age 47. Pausch was passionate about the need for technologists and artists to work together and unusually successful in making these collaborations work. The Pausch Prize will honor entertainment industry experts who embody his interdisciplinary spirit.
“We couldn’t think of a more fitting person to receive the first Pausch Prize than Ed Catmull,” said Don Marinelli, who co-founded the ETC with Pausch and is its executive producer. “Eleven years ago, when the ETC was just a vision that Randy and I were trying to make a reality, Ed generously shared with us his thoughts about how to prepare students for the new world of interactive digital media. His suggestions, including the idea of having everyone in the program study improvisational acting, were priceless. He helped us make the ETC a place where right-brained and left-brained individuals can work together successfully.”
Catmull co-founded Pixar, which has produced such films as “Toy Story,” “The Incredibles” and “Wall-E,” and created two other leading centers of computer graphics research — the computer graphics laboratory at the New York Institute of Technology and the computer division of Lucasfilm Ltd. These three organizations have been home to many of the most academically respected researchers in the field of computer graphics and have produced some of the field’s most fundamental advances. Catmull is one of the architects of the RenderMan rendering software, which just celebrated its 20th anniversary and has been used in 44 of the last 47 films nominated for an Academy Award® in the Visual Effects category.
Catmull has been honored with four Academy Awards, including a Technical Achievement Award, as well as the ACM SIGGRAPH Steven A. Coons Award for his lifetime contributions in the computer graphics field. He earned the IEEE’s John von Neumann Medal for contributions to computer graphics and a pioneering use of computer animation in motion pictures. Catmull earned a Ph.D. in computer science at the University of Utah.
Recipients of the Pausch Prize, which includes a $2,500 cash award, will present a lecture at Carnegie Mellon. Catmull will accept his prize and present the Pausch lecture at 9:15 a.m., Sept. 26 in McConomy Auditorium in Carnegie Mellon’s University Center, the site of Pausch’s famous “last lecture.”
The lecture also serves as the keynote address for the ICEC, which is hosted this year by the ETC. The ICEC is the largest and most prestigious conference for entertainment computing, where leading experts from academia and industry present their newest insights, products and demonstrations. In addition to Catmull, speakers include Stan Szymanski, senior vice president of Digital Production and Creative Resources for Sony Pictures Imageworks; Jesse Schell, assistant professor at the ETC, president of Schell Games and author of the new book “The Art of Game Design;” and Keiji Yamada, director of NEC Corporation’s C&C Innovation Research Laboratories.
About 300 researchers are expected to attend the ICEC Sept. 25-27. For information, please visit http://www.etc.cmu.edu/icec2008/
About Carnegie Mellon: Carnegie Mellon is a private research university with a distinctive mix of programs in engineering, computer science, robotics, business, public policy, fine arts and the humanities. More than 10,000 undergraduate and graduate students receive an education characterized by its focus on creating and implementing solutions for real problems, interdisciplinary collaboration, and innovation. A small student-to-faculty ratio provides an opportunity for close interaction between students and professors. While technology is pervasive on its 144-acre Pittsburgh campus, Carnegie Mellon is also distinctive among leading research universities for the world-renowned programs in its College of Fine Arts. A global university, Carnegie Mellon has campuses in Silicon Valley, Calif., and Qatar, and programs in Asia, Australia and Europe. For more, see www.cmu.edu.
Gearing up for their second semester together, the Active-Adventure team
decided the summer wasn't just about internships. It was about spreading the
word on their student-pitched project, "The Winds of Orbis".
The team was presented with multiple opportunities. Following June
publications on industry sites Gamasutra and Game Career Guides, the team
also demoed their world live. In July, the game was played at Cleveland's
Ingenuity Festival and Seth Sivak presented for Games, Learning, and Society
in Madison, Wisconsin. In August, Ryan Hipple, Zikun Fan, and Sivak
presented "Orbis" at the SIGGRAPH conference.
The team has also received media attention from other outlets including
another local news story by CBS-KDKA (interviewing Nate Morgan), an
interview with Bard McKinley for the Pittsburgh Pop City website, and Garth
DeAngelis' opinion article for Game Informer magazine's September 2008
issue.
Sim Ops Studios, a Pittsburgh company founded by ETC alumni, is launching their latest technology at DEMOfall 08.
For more information, visit:
http://www.wildpockets.com/?mod=news&page=article&id=2
Electronic Arts’ casual entertainment label has announced a new original IP title for the DS named Henry Hatsworth in the Puzzling Adventure, an 'indie-inspired' title created at EA Tiburon by ETC Experimental Gameplay Project alumnus Kyle Gray.
For more information: http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=19800
Disney announced a major research and development initiative to engage top technology universities to conduct research and development for its Parks & Resorts Division, Disney Media Networks, ESPN, Walt Disney Feature Animation, Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures, Disney Interactive Media Group and Pixar Animation Studios.
Carnegie Mellon University and the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich (ETH Zurich), known for their leading-edge work in computer science and technology, are to establish collaborative labs with Disney in Pittsburgh and Zurich.
“Creating the next generation of sophisticated technologies requires long-term vision and collaboration with world-class innovators,” said Ed Catmull, president, Disney and Pixar Animation Studios, making the announcement at SIGGRAPH, the world’s largest computer graphics conference. “We are strengthening our commitment to R&D throughout Disney by establishing labs with Carnegie Mellon University and ETH Zurich,” he said.
The labs will connect Disney with renowned academic partners with world class science and technology talent. The labs will engage in R&D on computer animation, computational cinematography, autonomous interactive characters, robotics, data mining and user interfaces, among other initiatives. They will be located at Carnegie Mellon in Pittsburgh and ETH Zurich. Each lab represents a five-year commitment from Disney to fund a director and seven to eight principal investigators. Additional staff will include professors, academic interns, scientific consultants and collaborators.
“Extending our R&D efforts to these top-notch university partners will take our internal initiatives to a new level,” said Joe Marks, vice president of R&D for Walt Disney Imagineering Research & Development. Marks is leading the Disney launch of the project and will oversee the labs for Disney.
Carnegie Mellon is home to some of the world’s leading researchers in computer science and engineering, entertainment technology and robotics, areas of particular interest to Disney. Jessica Hodgins, professor of computer science and robotics and director of Disney Research, Pittsburgh, said one of the lab’s first projects will be developing methods for people to interact with autonomous characters, either virtual or robotic. “We’ll be looking for ways to sense what a person is doing or thinking so that the character can respond appropriately,” she said. “Whether the character is a robot or a virtual creation, the interaction issues are the same. We need to figure out what sensors to build and how to interpret and respond to human behavior.”
The Disney Research lab’s offices are situated little more than a block away from Carnegie Mellon’s School of Computer Science complex. Hodgins said she expects that most projects will include faculty and student collaborators from Carnegie Mellon. Staff members also will be encouraged to teach classes at the university.
“The access Disney provides to real-world problems and data will enable us to do research with greater impact than is typically possible within a purely academic environment,” Hodgins said. “At the same time, Disney Research in Pittsburgh can tap expertise at Carnegie Mellon that can be applied to problems that cut across all of Disney’s business units.” In addition to work on autonomous characters, she anticipates projects involving databases, machine learning and visualization.
ETH Zurich has a strong tradition of research in computational methods and computer systems. It is one of the most renowned locations for research in computer science, and as such, a strong partner for Disney. Professor Markus Gross, head of ETH Zurich’s Computer Graphics Laboratory in the Department of Computer Science, calls the collaboration with Disney “on the cusp of the cutting-edge.”
“We have been looking for a partner like Disney to create synergies that will open up a wide spectrum of different fields in entertainment technology,” Gross says. He adds that, “Our research will explore novel algorithms to bring both traditional animation and 3D computer animation to the next level of perfection. We will investigate how artistic knowledge and rules can be incorporated into computer-assisted production and content creation. Additionally, we will design the next generation of cinematographic technology.”
The applied research and joint intellectual properties that will result from the technology transfer will offer new and creative opportunities to strengthen ETH Zurich’s talent, potential and ability to make an impact on industry. The Disney Research lab in Zurich will work with faculty members from the Department of Computer Science, specifically with Visual Computing and the Computer Graphics Laboratory, to conduct the highest level applied research in areas including computer animation, image synthesis, computational photography and artificial intelligence.
Joint Ph.D. projects and research contracts, as well as teaching services from senior Disney researchers, are part of the advantages and synergies to be drawn from the collaboration. Professor Markus Gross will head Disney Research in Zurich.
The individual R&D programs at Disney Parks & Resorts, Pixar and Disney Animation Studios, Interactive Games, Disney‘s television and motion picture studios, and ImageMovers Digital and their existing university alliances with schools throughout the globe will continue. The Pittsburgh and Zurich labs will focus on areas of research that span multiple business units across the company.
