Meet the Speakers

Math, Robotics, and Deepfakes, Oh My! Meet the First Wave of Featured Speakers for SIGGRAPH 2021

Pictured (left to right): Grant Sanderson, Dr. Kate Darling, and Hany Farid

Hot off the presses: three Featured Speakers for the upcoming virtual SIGGRAPH 2021 conference have just been announced! Participants can check out each of these expert’s featured sessions during the conference’s live week, which will take place 9–13 August.

Learn more about each of the speakers below and check out some hand-picked bonus content for a sneak peek leading up to their SIGGRAPH 2021 presentations. For full bios on each featured speaker, visit our website.

Dr. Kate Darling

“My favorite thing about SIGGRAPH is the interdisciplinarity. I can’t wait to talk to everyone about robots!”

As robotics investments boom and human-robot interaction increasingly enters workplaces and households all over the world, much space has been devoted to talking about robots as replacements for humans. Diving into the topic of her latest book, SIGGRAPH 2021 participants can catch Dr. Kate Darling’s session “The New Breed: What Our History With Animals Reveals About Our Future with Robots” in August. In the meantime, check out Dr. Darling’s recent publications, watch her TED talk, or press play on the podcast below to familiarize yourself with her work.

Grant Sanderson

“Having spent so much of my time using computer graphics to help teach math, I’m excited to engage more with the graphics community itself.”

Grant Sanderson’s popular YouTube channel, 3Blue1Brown, has spurred his interest in the connection between computer graphics and teaching math. While making videos that use programmatic visualizations to explain topics in mathematics, the visualizations themselves often require a lot of interesting mathematics that never get mentioned in the final video. In his session, Sanderson will discuss some of the more interesting examples of mathematical nuances that pop up while illustrating 3Blue1Brown. Get to know Sanderson by checking out his YouTube videos or watching the recent Q&A he shared below.

Hany Farid

“The computer graphics community is at the forefront of developing powerful tools for the creation of highly realistic, synthetic content, and are in the best position to think about the implications and mitigations of these technologies.”

During SIGGRAPH 2021, Dr. Hany Farid will provide an overview of the creation of so-called deepfakes and describe emerging techniques for detecting them as part of a session titled “Creating, Weaponizing, and Detecting Deepfakes.” But first, learn more about his work via a recent ABC News/“Nightline” segment below or by watching his 2018 TED Talk.


Stay tuned for more featured speakers announcements coming soon! Register for SIGGRAPH 2021.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.