Leadership

Brian Curless

Director

Brian Curless is a Professor in the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Washington. He earned his bachelor's degree in Electrical Engineering at the University of Texas at Austin and, after a stint as a research engineer at SRI International, went on to earn his Ph.D. degree in Electrical Engineering at Stanford University. He is co-founder and co-editor-in-chief of the journal Foundations and Trends in Computer Graphics and Vision and served as chair for the International Conference on 3D Vision (3DV 2013). He received the Stanford University Gores Teaching Award, Stanford's Arthur Samuels Computer Science Thesis Award, NSF Career Award, Sloan Fellowship, and UW ACM Teaching Award. His work on 3D surface reconstruction led to real-time 3D mapping algorithms now used in Microsoft Hololens and Google’s Project Tango devices. His research is focused on 3D photography and computational photography with applications to AR and VR.

Ira Kemelmacher-Shlizerman

Co-Director

Prof. Kemelmacher-Shlizerman is a Scientist and Entrepreneur. Ira's interests are in the intersection of computer vision, computer graphics, and learning. She is an Associate Professor at the Allen School University of Washington, Director of the UW Reality Lab, and lead for a moonshot project at Google. Previously she founded a startup Dreambit that was acquired by Facebook in 2016, and spent two years at Facebook as Research Scientist building products between 2016-2018. Before that in 2011 Ira tech transfered product Face Movies to Google.

Ira's Ph.D is in computer science and applied mathematics from the Weizmann Institute of Science. Her works were awarded the Google faculty award, Madrona prize, the GeekWire Innovation of the Year Award, 2016, selected to the covers of CACM and SIGGRAPH, and frequently covered by most national and international media. She has been serving as area chair and technical committee of both CVPR and SIGGRAPH, and part of Expert Network, LDV capital. Ira teaches computer vision, computer graphics, and the popular novel AR/VR class

Steve Seitz

Co-Director

Steve Seitz is Robert E. Dinning Professor in the Allen School at the University of Washington. He is also a Director on Google's Daydream team, where he leads teleportation efforts including Google Jump and Cardboard Camera. He received his B.A. in computer science and mathematics at the University of California, Berkeley in 1991 and his Ph.D. in computer sciences at the University of Wisconsin in 1997. Following his doctoral work, he did a postdoc at Microsoft Research, and then a couple years as Assistant Professor in the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. He joined the faculty at the University of Washington in July 2000. His co-authored papers have won the David Marr Prize (twice) at ICCV, and the CVPR 2015 best paper award. He received an NSF Career Award, and ONR Young Investigator Award, an Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship, and is an IEEE Fellow and an ACM Fellow. His work on Photo Tourism (joint with Noah Snavely and Rick Szeliski) formed the basis of Microsoft's Photosynth technology. Professor Seitz is interested in problems in 3D computer vision and computer graphics, and their application to virtual and augmented reality.

Industry Advisors

Michael Abrash

Chief Scientist, Oculus

Michael Abrash is the Chief Scientist of Reality Labs, Meta, a research laboratory that brings together a world-class R&D team of scientists, developers and engineers to build the future of connection within virtual and augmented reality. He was graphics lead for the first two versions of Windows NT, teamed with John Carmack to write Quake at Id Software, worked on the first two versions of Microsoft’s Xbox, co-authored the Pixomatic software renderer at Rad Game Tools, worked on Intel’s Larrabee project, and helped develop virtual reality at Valve. He is also the author of several books, including Michael Abrash’s Programming Black Book.

David Salesin

Principal Scientist / Director, Google Research

David Salesin is a Principal Scientist at Google Research, where he leads the Gcam team, whose mission is to imagine and build the future of photography. David is also an Affiliate Professor in the Department of Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Washington, where he has been on the faculty since 1992. Prior to Google, he was Director of Research for Snap (2017-19), led the Creative Technologies Lab for Adobe Research as VP & Fellow (2005-17), and worked as a Senior Researcher at Microsoft Research (1999-2005). Earlier, he worked at Lucasfilm and Pixar, contributing computer animation to Academy Award-winning shorts and feature-length films (1983-87). He received his Sc.B. from Brown University in 1983, and his Ph.D. from Stanford University in 1991.

Salesin received an NSF Young Investigator award, an ONR Young Investigator Award, an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship, an NSF Presidential Faculty Fellow Award, the University of Washington Award for Outstanding Faculty Achievement in the College of Engineering, the University of Washington Distinguished Teaching Award, The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and the Council for the Advancement and Support of Education 1998-1999 Washington Professor of the Year Award, and the ACM SIGGRAPH Computer Graphics Achievement Award. He was also named a Guest Professor of Zhejiang University and an ACM Fellow.

Hongyu Sun

Sr. Director of Engineering, Seattle Research Center, OPPO

Dr. Sun is head of the software graphics & imaging dept in OPPO, responsible for converting state of the art technologies into products. He is particularly focused on rendering, both realistic and AI. Before OPPO, he was Senior Computer Vision Engineer at Aibee, Inc., and chief software architect for Huawei, terminal OS dept, responsible for computer vision features in the HiAI engine. He holds a Ph.D from Iowa State University, where he worked under Robyn Lutz.

Walterio Mayol

Principal Research Scientist, Amazon

Walterio Mayol-Cuevas (DPhil, Oxford 2005) is Principal Research Scientist at Amazon in Seattle, USA and Professor at the Computer Science Department, University of Bristol, UK. His work developed some of the earliest wearable computing systems with cameras. And jointly with students and collaborators pioneered some of the earliest versions of visual simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) and its applications to Robotics and Augmented Reality. These include flagship humanoid robots and early commercial applications of visual mapping for wearable computing.

Most recent work includes novel concepts of human-robot interaction, fast Computer Vision methods for scene understanding, algorithms for novel visual sensors and machine learning applications to capture and asses skill visually. His work has received awards and nominations at IEEE ICRA, CHI, BMVC and others and featured internationally such as by The Economist, New Scientist, BBC, Discovery Channel, among many others. General co-chair for BMVC 2013 and General Chair for the 2016 IEEE International Symposium on Mixed and Augmented Reality (ISMAR).

Michael F. Cohen

Director of Computational Photography, Facebook

Michael Cohen is a research scientist in the Facebook Computational Photography Research group as of the Fall of 2015. He arrived at Facebook after 21 years at Microsoft Research while also serving as an Affiliate Professor at the University of Washington. Previously he served on the faculties at Princeton and Cornell Universities. The Computational Photography Team at Facebook was formed in 2015 to build new ways to share photos and videos on the social media platform, including allowing Facebook users to share 3D videos and Virtual Reality videos to their profiles.

Michael is also a longtime ACM SIGGRAPH volunteer, and plays a key role in the organization: leading the prestigious awards program at the SIGGRAPH conference each year.

Shahram Izadi

Senior Director of Engineering, Google

Shahram Izadi is an engineering leader in AR, specializing in real-time computer vision and machine learning techniques for mixed reality and interaction. Previously he was CTO/Founder of PerceptiveIO, and a partner researcher and research manager at Microsoft Research (Redmond) for 11 years where he led the interactive 3D technologies (I3D) group. This was an extremely multi-discipline group, which straddles many boundaries including human-computer interaction, augmented reality, applied computer vision and graphics, electronics, signal processing, and optics.

His research focuses on building new technologies and systems that blur the boundaries between real and virtual interaction. This typically involves building new types of depth cameras, sensors or displays; creating practical algorithms and techniques for these types of novel technologies; as well as designing new user experiences that are enabled through this technical research.

Yi Xu

Director of XR Research, OPPO Research Institute

Yi Xu oversees XR R&D at OPPO, including strategic planning, product development, and advanced research. Before OPPO, he was a researcher at JD.com, CapsoVision, and General Electric. He holds a PhD in computer science from Purdue University, where he developed projector-camera systems for reconstruction of moving and deforming objects.

Wasiq Bokhari

Director, Amazon

Wasiq Bokhari is a Director at Amazon. Prior, he was at Google, and before that, founder/CEO of multiple startups in sensors and robotics. He is interested in utilizing AR/VR and CV/ML techniques to enable compelling customer experiences. He is a physicist and a mathematician by training, with undergraduate and doctorate degrees from MIT.

Core Members

Barbara Mones

Director of the Reality Studio

Barbara Mones is a Teaching Professor in the School of Computer Science & Engineering, and Director of the Reality Studio, a part of the Reality Lab. She also leads the Facial Expression Research Group ( FERG). She has worked in both academia and industry in the areas of computer graphics and animation production for over thirty years. She was a tenured Associate Professor and the Founder and Director of the Visual Information Technology Graduate program at George Mason University, a Visiting Researcher in the Department of Computer Science at George Washington University, Fellow at the Human Interface Technology Lab at University of Canterbury, New Zealand, and worked for the White House and National Aeronautics and Space Administration on Al Gore's GLOBE (Global Learning and Observations to Benefit the Environment) Program. For this she was presented with a NASA Group Achievement award. She designed and wrote training programs for all aspects of the production pipeline at both Pacific Data Images/Dreamworks and Industrial Light and Magic. In her role as faculty, she has directed and produced nineteen animated shorts since 1999. Most recently she is developing curriculum that incorporates the potential of Virtual Reality into storytelling, content development and filmmaking. She has lectured extensively on an international level on topics related to animation and curriculum development. Her films have been shown in theaters and museums internationally including the SIGGRAPH Electronic Theater and the Smithsonian Institution. Barbara received her undergraduate degree from University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Thereafter, she studied animation at Sheridan College and received an MFA from Rhode Island School of Design.

John Akers

Director of Research and Education

John Akers is the Director of Research and Education at the UW Reality Lab. He received his Masters degree in Computer Science and Informatics from the University of Washington, where he focused on extended reality and user experience engineering, and worked in the Taskar Center for Accessible Technology researching accessible inputs for VR.

David Kessler

Program Manager

David Kessler is the Reality Lab Program Manager. He is a Conference and Stage Manager, a logistics and people wrangler, and an organizer of just about anything for Academic, Corporate, or Arts organizations. He is the Co-Producer of the Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony, and a Board Member for the local non-profit, Maritime Folknet. Before moving to Seattle and joining UW, he worked at the MIT Sloan School of Management. He has worked as a Calligrapher, Tai Chi Teacher, freelance Writer and Editor, Event Planner, Whisky Educator, and Sea Chantey Singer. He Studied Philosophy and Medieval Studies at Boston University.

Affiliated Faculty & Researchers

Faculty

Magdalena Balazinska⋅ Luis Ceze⋅ Alvin Cheung⋅ Ali Farhadi⋅ Leah Findlater⋅ Dieter Fox⋅ Jon Froehlich⋅ Thomas Furness⋅ Shyam Gollakota⋅ Jeff Herron⋅ Tadayoshi Kohno⋅ Arka Majumdar⋅ Shwetak Patel⋅ Rajesh Rao⋅ Franziska Roesner⋅ Adriana Schulz⋅ Linda Shapiro

Researchers

Deepali Aneja⋅ Elyas Bayati⋅ Alex Colburn⋅ Shane Colburn⋅ Gary Faigin⋅ Alice Gao⋅ Nikita Haduong⋅ Brandon Haynes⋅ Dalton Hildreth⋅ Aleksander Hołynski⋅ Vikram Iyer⋅ Dhruv Jain⋅ Vivek Jayaram⋅ Teerapat Jenrungrot⋅ Johanna Karras⋅ Shu Liang⋅ Benlin Liu⋅ Xuan Luo⋅ Jingwei Ma⋅ Amrita Mazumdar⋅ James Noeckel⋅ Roy Or-El⋅ Farshid Salemi Parizi⋅ Jeong Joon Park⋅ Courtnie Paschall⋅ Andrzej Pronobis⋅ Konstantinos Rematas⋅ Junha Roh⋅ Soumyadip Sengupta⋅ Mengyi Shan⋅ Meng-Li Shih⋅ Anran Wang⋅ Xiaojuan Wang⋅ Yifan Wang⋅ Chung-Yi Weng⋅ Eric Whitmire⋅ Edward Zhang⋅ Joseph Zhong⋅ Luyang Zhu

People