Get to know Alton Glass, a member of the SIGGRAPH 2019 Immersive Jury, and Tamy Boubekeur and Matthias Nießner, two members of the SIGGRAPH 2019 Technical Papers Committee. Read on to learn what excites them about their work, how they tap into inspiration, and their favorite SIGGRAPH memories.
SIGGRAPH: What is the best career advice you’ve ever received? Who gave it?
Alton Glass (AG): “Define success for yourself, or people will define it for you.” —Alfonso U. Glass
Tamy Boubekeur (TB): “Go visit Berlin,” from the president of my Ph.D. committee.
Matthias Nießner (MN): “Have a research vision; drop all unrelated projects.” —Yaser Sheikh
SIGGRAPH: In your opinion, what technology doesn’t get a lot of love but has greatly improved the world?
AG: The pen and paper.
TB: GPS.
MN: Plain, simple, non-linear least-squares optimization.
SIGGRAPH: What excites you most about your work? Where does your passion come from?
AG: Using my imagination and knowing that it’s boundless.
TB: I love inventing algorithms that produce visual entities. My passion came from watching the demoscene when I was kid and the CG shorts presented at Imagina every year.
MN: Capturing reality, holograms, and making science fiction become reality.
SIGGRAPH: What is one contribution you’ve made to the industry that has been most meaningful to you?
AG: Teaching creative entrepreneurship to empower artists to think like a business.
MN: OpenSubdiv which emerged from my very first paper at SIGGRAPH with Charles Loop, Mark Meyer, and Tony DeRose.
SIGGRAPH: What’s one thing you keep at your desk that you can’t live without? Or that inspires you?
AG: A bottle of water to remind me of our abundance and not overlooking the simple things in life that have extreme value.
MN: I love a good workout — it keeps the mind clear and inspires new research.
SIGGRAPH: Share a resource you frequent for inspiration.
AG: E-book machines, platforms, crowds.
TB: Italy.
MN: SIGGRAPH.
SIGGRAPH: Share a fond SIGGRAPH memory.
AG: Being an immersive content judge and watching awesome experiences of future storytellers.
TB: Which Finnkampen was that already… ?
MN: Finnkampen!
Editor’s note: Finnkampen, in this context, refers to is an unofficial Nordic get-together at SIGGRAPH. View more juror profiles. (February 2020) A previous version of this story stated that Alton Glass served on the Technical Papers Committee, this has been corrected to the Immersive Jury.
Alton Glass is an immersive storyteller and co-founder of GRX Immersive Labs, a creative technology studio and R&D lab specializing in transforming narratives via cross-platform immersive media.
Tamy Boubekeur is a researcher in computer science, where he specializes in 3D computer graphics. He is currently head of research, 3D and Immersive, at Adobe, and was previously the founder and head of the Computer Graphics Group at Telecom Paris and chief scientist at Allegorithmic (Adobe).
Matthias Nießner, Ph. D., is a professor at the Technical University of Munich where he leads the Visual Computing Lab. Nießner’s research lies at the intersection of computer vision, graphics, and machine learning, where he is particularly interested in cutting-edge techniques for 3D reconstruction, semantic 3D scene understanding, video editing, and AI-driven video synthesis. In total, he has published over 70 academic publications, including 22 papers in the prestigious ACM Transactions on Graphics (SIGGRAPH / SIGGRAPH Asia) journal and 18 works at leading vision conferences (CVPR, ECCV, ICCV); several of these works won best paper awards, including at SIGCHI’14, HPG’15, SPG’18, and the SIGGRAPH 2016 Emerging Technologies Award for the best Live Demo.
