The Reality Lab Lectures continue with 3 new speakers here in Winter 2023, in addition to the catalog of past talks available on our YouTube channel. Upcoming speakers include Ben Poole (Google Brain), Mark Billinghurst (University of South Australia), and Thomas Lewis (Microsoft).
Ben Poole
Ben is a research scientist at Google Brain in San Francisco working on deep generative models for images, video, and 3D. He completed his PhD at Stanford University advised by Surya Ganguli in the Neural Dynamics and Computation lab. His thesis was on computational tools to develop a better understanding of both biological and artificial neural networks. He’s worked at DeepMind, Google Research, Intel Research Pittsburgh, and the NYU Center for Neural Science.
Mark Billinghurst
Mark is Director of the Empathic Computing Laboratory, and Professor at the University of South Australia in Adelaide, Australia, and also at the University of Auckland in Auckland, New Zealand. He earned a PhD in 2002 from the University of Washington and conducts research on how virtual and real worlds can be merged, publishing over 700 papers on Augmented Reality, Virtual Reality, remote collaboration, Empathic Computing, and related topics. In 2013 he was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society of New Zealand, and in 2019 was given the ISMAR Career Impact Award in recognition for lifetime contribution to AR research and commercialization. In 2022 he was inducted into the inaugural class of the IEEE VGTC VR Academy, and in 2023 elected as a Fellow of the IEEE.
Thomas Lewis
Thomas is a Spatial Computing Cloud Advocate Lead in Microsoft’s Developer Relations. He has worked in a variety of roles and geographies at Microsoft for over 20 years. Thomas is currently advocating on behalf of developers, designers, creators, and builders of Mixed Reality experiences. After putting on a Mixed Reality headset, he knew that he had experienced a taste of the future and sees the beauty, sadness, and hope that it can bring to humans.
In 2020 we pivoted to online talks, which we coordinated with the popular UW CSE AR/VR Capstone class. Moving online helped us keep the series alive, with the bonus that we could invite speakers we might not otherwise get because of travel or health concerns. We look forward to in-person talks in the future, and to being able to invite the public to attend once more. But for now, we invite our students and researchers to the talks, and then release them on YouTube afterward.
Our YouTube channel includes 32 Reality Lab Lectures, along with Demo Day videos, a 7-video introduction to WebXR and A-frame, and more.