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Regan Mandryk

A 2023 CHCCS/SCDHM Achievement Award is presented to Professor Regan Mandryk, recognizing Regan’s exceptional contributions to human-computer interaction, games research, and digital well-being. Regan is recognized within HCI for her continued efforts to bring games research to the forefront of HCI, her leadership, and her outstanding mentorship.

Regan Mandryk has an interdisciplinary background in mathematics (B.Sc., University of Winnipeg), kinesiology (M.Sc., Simon Fraser University), and computer science (Ph.D., Simon Fraser University). Regan completed her dissertation Modeling User Emotion in Interactive Play Environments: A Fuzzy Physiological Approach in 2005. She presented three experimental studies that examine players’ physiological signals to model user emotions while they were continuously interacting with play technology. Regan’s work was visionary. The game industry was in its early stages, user evaluation approaches for game technology were underdeveloped, and affective computing was not much older than a decade. The quality of her work was recognized with the Dean of Graduate Studies Convocation Medal.

Regan joined the Human-Computer Interaction Lab at the University of Saskatchewan in 2007. Receiving an NSERC University Faculty Award in 2008, Regan implemented her visionary perspective on video games’ role in science and society. Her deep-reaching understanding of the importance of games and their potential to contribute to social, physical, and mental health has led to more than 200 publications in top venues, fundamentally changing the view of games in contemporary HCI research. Her research has been supported by prestigious networks such as the GRAND NCE, SurfNet, and SWaGUR —the first-ever Canadian graduate training program for games researchers that she created and led – which structurally advanced games research in Canada. Regan co-founded the thriving ACM SIGCHI conference series CHI PLAY to facilitate international recognition of the value of games research. She supported CHI PLAY’s transition to a journal format CHI PLAY PACM and continued her leadership of the conference series as a steering committee member from 2014-2022.

Over the last 15 years, Regan has advanced the design, development, and evaluation of novel technologies that improve people’s social, cognitive, and emotional well-being. With an h-index of 53, 13k+ citations, 26 best papers or honourable mentions, the quality of Regan’s excellence in research has received continuous recognition. She has received the Canadian Association for Computer Science’s Outstanding Young Canadian Computer Science (2015), the University of Saskatchewan New Researcher Award (2015), the E.W.R. Steacie Memorial Fellowship (2018), and the Tier 1 Canada Research Chair in Digital Gaming Technologies and Experiences (2020-2023). Regan was inducted into the ACM SIGCHI Academy in 2023, recognizing her many substantial contributions to the field of human-computer interaction.

Regan’s excellence has continuously inspired young researchers. Training she provided has been fundamental to the career of internationally successful faculty members at institutions in Canada (University of Waterloo, Dalhousie University) and Europe (Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, GER, Eindhoven University of Technology, NL, Utrecht University, NL, and University College London, UK). Among her trainees are recipients of prestigious awards such as the Banting post-doctoral fellowships, the Vanier Canada Graduate Scholarship, the Saskatchewan Governor General’s Gold Medal, and the CHCCS/SCDHM Bill Buxton award. She has positively impacted the career of more than 100 aspiring academics as a supervisor, mentor, and examiner and she has contributed to the career development of multiple national and international scholars. The Graduate Student Association at the University of Saskatchewan recognized her outstanding supervision in 2012, 2016, 2017, and 2018.

Involved in program committee work since 2006, Regan has dedicated herself to service to the HCI community. She chaired the CHI conference steering committee from 2019-2022, represented the CHI conference as the adjunct chair to the SIGCHI executive committee, and will serve on the CHI steering committee as the chair emeritus until 2024. Regan co-chaired CHI 2018 in Montreal. For CHI PLAY, Regan served as papers chair in 2014, 2015, 2023 and the upcoming 2024 and as technical program chair in 2016. The Graphics Interface conference holds a special place in Regan’s service work as it was her first program committee experience, her first session chairing experience, and she has been involved in the steering committee since 2006. Her service work has promoted advances in peer review and organizational processes across SIGCHI venues. She has continuously contributed to central challenges of volunteer-organized processes and she has tirelessly addressed critical community-wide challenges of diversity, equity, and inclusion, peer review, and continued community growth.

In 2023 Regan moved to the University of Victoria to join the Victoria Interactive eXperiences with Information (VIXI) lab at the University of Victoria, where she continues championing HCI and the science of video games. When Regan takes a break from changing the world, she enjoys travelling, finding amazing cocktail bars, and having academic adventures across the globe. You can find Regan in the largest crowd at any social gathering by listening for loud and cheerful laughter. Having relocated to Victoria, she enjoys spending time learning to sail with her kids, Foster and Rowan.

May 30, 2023
Demetri Terzopoulos

A 2023 CHCCS/SCDHM Achievement Award from the Canadian Human-Computer Communications Society is presented to Academy Award winning Professor Demetri Terzopoulos for his pioneering and sustained contributions to computer graphics over the course of nearly four decades. He has shown remarkable prescience, envisioning long before others several of the most important research directions in the field. His more than 400 scholarly publications in multiple scientific domains include ground-breaking papers that have given impetus to the physics, biology, learning, and artificial life (Alife)-based approaches to computer graphics modeling and animation.

His seminal SIGGRAPH ‘87 paper on “Elastically Deformable Models” established Terzopoulos as the founder of physically-based modeling and animation. In its 2005 Academy Award for Technical Achievement to him and John Platt for their “pioneering work in physically-based computer-generated techniques used to simulate realistic cloth in motion pictures,” the AMPAS formally recognized their paper as “a milestone in computer graphics, introducing the concept of physically-based techniques to simulate moving, deforming objects.” His subsequent papers on Deformable Models (a term Terzopoulos coined that now appears in the IEEE Taxonomy) included a SIGGRAPH ‘88 paper with Kurt Fleischer that first introduced inelastic deformation and fracture mechanics to computer animation. Terzopoulos’s pioneering work has inspired a vibrant worldwide industry of research, with publications on deformable models appearing unabated in every major conference on computer graphics, and in other fields such as computer vision and medical imaging, since 1987.

Terzopoulos next broadened the scope of his graphics research to include biologically-based modeling and animation, an area in which he is now also widely recognized as a pioneer and leading proponent. His early work, with Keith Waters, yielded the first realistic, muscle-actuated biomechanical model of the human face, published in 1990, prompting much follow-on work globally on physically-based facial animation, including their highly-cited SIGGRAPH ‘95 paper on “Realistic Modeling for Facial Animation” with Terzopoulos’s student Yuencheng Lee.

Terzopoulos’s research subsequently expanded greatly to encompass ALife modeling, demonstrating the tremendous scope and power of a paradigm that subsumes all aspects of living systems, from biomechanics to intelligence. Not only has he been the leading champion of this richly multidisciplinary approach, but his foundational work has been field-defining. A landmark SIGGRAPH ‘94 paper with his student Xiaoyuan Tu introduced the influential ALife model known as “Artificial Fishes”, for which Tu’s University of Toronto PhD dissertation won the 1996 ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award, the first time that this coveted prize recognized a non-US dissertation. This was followed by the ground-breaking SIGGRAPH ‘99 paper on “Cognitive Modeling” with John Funge and Tu, which revealed the potential of cognitive AI for autonomous character animation. Since 2000, with successive PhD students (Shao, Yu, Huang), he published influential papers on “Autonomous Pedestrians”, propounding an ALife-based multi-human simulation approach acutely differentiated from mainstream crowd simulation.

Terzopoulos moreover pioneered the harnessing of machine learning for computer graphics. A SIGGRAPH ‘95 paper with his student Radek Grzeszczuk on “Learning Muscle-Actuated Locomotion” opened the way with reinforcement learning, and their SIGGRAPH ‘98 paper on “The NeuroAnimator” with Geoffrey Hinton, marked the first use of neural networks in computer graphics, specifically demonstrating the promise of data-driven learning to efficiently emulate realistic physical dynamics and effectively control physics-based animation. This latter work was well ahead of its time, but deep learning has recently become a hot topic permeating the graphics field.

Since 2004, Terzopoulos and a succession of his students (Lee, Si, Nakada, Lakshmipathy, Zhou) have been engaged in the most ambitious and comprehensive work on biomimetic human simulation in any field. His UCLA group has pioneered the combination of biomechanical and sensorial modeling as well as the most advanced application of deep learning in computer graphics to date, specifically achieving automated neuro-musculoskeletal and neuro-sensorimotor control in their unprecedentedly anatomically-detailed biomechanical model of the human body (SIGGRAPH ‘06, TOG ‘09, TOG ‘14, SIGGRAPH ‘18, SIGGRAPH-Asia ‘19).

Terzopoulos has been a professor of computer science, electrical and computer engineering, and mathematics who has taught undergraduate and graduate level computer graphics at three universities (Toronto, NYU, UCLA). In a Web3D ‘19 paper “An Online Collaborative Ecosystem for Educational Computer Graphics” he and his student Garret Ridge describe their innovative pedagogical software infrastructure, which has benefitted many students at UCLA, where Terzopoulos is currently a Distinguished Professor and Chancellor’s Professor of Computer Science. He is a former Guggenheim Fellow, Canada Council for the Arts Killam Research Fellow, NSERC EWR Steacie Memorial Fellow, CIFAR AI and Robotics Fellow, and a Fellow of the ACM, IEEE, Royal Society of London, Royal Society of Canada, and other scholarly societies. He has received many major awards, among them IEEE’s Computer Pioneer Award, Helmholtz Prize, and inaugural Computer Vision Distinguished Researcher Award. He has given more than 500 invited talks worldwide about his research, among them over 150 distinguished/plenary/keynote addresses. Terzopoulos graduated in Honours Electrical Engineering from McGill University and obtained his doctorate in Artificial Intelligence from MIT.

May 28, 2023
Dinesh K. Pai

A 2020 CHCCS/SCDHM Achievement Award from the Canadian Human-Computer Communications Society is presented to Prof. Dinesh K. Pai (UBC) for his numerous high-impact contributions to the field of computer graphics research.

His highly interdisciplinary research is focused on developing computational models of human movement. He has made significant contributions to physics-based animation, multisensory displays including haptics and sound, robotics, biomechanics, and neural control of movement. In support of this, he has developed many novel software and hardware systems related to multisensory capture for humans, sound, and physical properties of the world.

At UBC he directs the Sensorimotor Systems Laboratory, whose state-of-the-art facilities include custom-built skin and fabric measurement devices, 3D full body color scanners, motion capture systems, a suite of skin measurement instruments, an ultrasound system, EMG systems, several eye trackers, haptic interfaces, force sensors, and robots. He founded the UBC spinoff company Vital Mechanics Research, to translate his basic research in skin and tissue simulation into applications. Software from Vital Mechanics has been used in the visual effects and apparel industries.

Prof. Pai has an exceptional track record of mentorship. More than a dozen of the Ph.D. students and postdocs he has supervised or co-supervised now hold faculty positions, including eight in Canada: at McGill, Ottawa, Toronto (2X), Saskatchewan, Simon Fraser, BCIT, and UBC. Others include professors at Stanford, Texas A&M, George Mason, and Birmingham and research scientists at Adobe, Beijing Film Academy, and CNRS France. Many of his students now have leadership roles in the graphics and haptics industries.

Prof. Pai’s scholarship has been recognized by named professorships, awards, prestigious grants, and numerous invited lectures. He has been Professeur Invité at the Collège de France, Paris, and appointed Santa Chiara Chair in Cognitive Science at the University of Siena, Italy. He holds a Tier 1 Canada Research Chair, and received UBC’s Killam Research Prize. He received one of the most competitive and prestigious international research grants in life science, from the Human Frontier Science Program. He has given more than 100 invited lectures, including the Teruko Yata Distinguished Lecture at Carnegie Mellon University, Stanford’s Broad-Area Colloquium, Distinguished Lectures at Columbia and Penn, Institute Colloquium at Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics, Germany, and several conference keynotes.

Prof. Pai received his Ph.D. from Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, and his B.Tech. degree from the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras. He has been a Professor at Rutgers University; held visiting professorships at Carnegie Mellon University’s Robotics Institute and New York University’s Center for Neural Science; and a Fellowship of the BC Advanced Systems Institute. See https://sensorimotor.cs.ubc.ca/pai/ for more information.

April 24, 2020
Gordon Kurtenbach

A 2018 CHCCS/SCDHM Achievement Award from the Canadian Human-Computer Communications Society is presented to Dr. Gordon Kurtenbach for his many contributions to the field of human-computer interaction (HCI), especially his work on novel interaction techniques for gesture-based and pen-based interfaces, his leadership in building arguably the most successful industry-based computer science research group in Canada, his exemplary role promoting collaboration between universities and industry in Canada, and his active mentorship of some of the best young Canadian researchers in the field.

Dr. Gordon Kurtenbach is the Head of Autodesk Research. After completing his B.Sc. with High Honours in Computer Science at the University of Saskatchewan in 1984, he earned his M.Sc. in 1988 in Computer Science at the University of Toronto and his Ph.D. in 1993, also in Computer Science at the University of Toronto. He worked in the Advanced Technology Group at Apple Computer and later at Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) before joining Alias Research in 1994. Starting in 1999, he led the Interactive Graphics Research Group at Alias and later, after Alias was acquired by Autodesk in 2006, he and his team continued to pursue highly innovative projects that bridged the gap between research and commercialization as Autodesk Research within the Office of the CTO at Autodesk. He currently oversees a large range of research for Autodesk that includes human-computer interaction, visualization and simulation, machine intelligence, and modeling of complex systems.

His team at Autodesk is one of the rare industrial research groups in Canada that has thrived while still being part of a hi-tech Silicon Valley-based company. Under his guidance, Autodesk Research has continued to be one of the leading industrial computing research labs in Canada, known internationally for its many innovations in computer graphics and human-computer interaction. Top researchers in both of these fields have worked at one time or another at Autodesk, often as student interns working across many disciplines, including computer graphics, human computer interaction, physical simulation, green environmental initiatives, and computer aided geometric design. This has helped foster and support the Canadian research community by providing mentoring and encouragement to multiple generations of talented Canadians. Another notable achievement is the incredible number of successful research-to-product transfers Dr. Kurtenbach’s research organization has achieved. It is not a stretch to say that the tech-transfer model within his organization, where research-to-product technology transfer specialists are embedded within the research organization, is one that other companies would do well to emulate if they are to leverage their investments in pure research.

Dr. Kurtenbach has played a key role making unique research opportunities available to Canadians. Beginning in 2010 he served as the chair of the Research Management Committee for the Graphics, Animation and New Media Network of Centres of Excellence, where he helped set priorities for a pan-Canadian, cross-disciplinary research program aimed at increasing collaboration across the digital media community within Canada. In 2012, his team at Autodesk Research was recognized with an NSERC Synergy Award for Innovation for their 20-year partnership with the University of Toronto for research and development of visual modeling technology, which has advanced the fields of film production, animation, architecture, medicine, and others. In 2018 he was honored with a prestigious “Alumni of Influence” award by University of Saskatchewan’s College of Arts and Science.

Dr. Kurtenbach has published numerous research papers and holds over fifty patents in the field of human-computer interaction. His work on gesture-based interfaces – specifically “marking menus” – has been recognized as highly influential in HCI research and practice. This work helped shape today’s graphical user interfaces and is a forerunner to the ubiquitous gestural interfaces of today’s tablets and smartphones. He has also made significant contributions developing interaction techniques for large wall displays as well as more traditional desktop systems. Pioneering work on two-handed input, high performance menu access, and alternate input techniques provided a strong patent position, enabled by his earlier effort establishing intellectual property and patent processes, which were instrumental in developing leading-edge products such as Maya, AliasStudio, SketchBook and PortfolioWall. In 2003, he shared a Special Academy Award with fellow Alias Research Group members and the software development team for the Maya 3D Computer Graphics and Animation Software. In 2005, he received the ACM UIST Lasting Impact Award for his 1991 co-authored paper on combining marking and direct manipulation techniques.

March 20, 2018
Alla Sheffer

A 2018 CHCCS/SCDHM Achievement Award from the Canadian Human-Computer Communications Society is presented to Dr. Alla Sheffer for her numerous highly impactful contributions to the field of computer graphics research.

Dr. Sheffer’s diverse research addresses geometric modeling and processing problems both in traditional computer graphics settings and in multiple other application domains, including product design, mechanical and civil engineering, and fashion. She has made major contributions to core geometry processing topics, including hexahedral meshing and developable surface manipulation. Her mesh parameterization methods, particularly her ABF (angle-based flattening) algorithm, are referenced in every book and every survey on geometry processing and are taught in many advanced modeling courses worldwide.

Her recent research applies insights about human perception and communication of shapes to algorithmic shape processing and has yielded novel modeling methods targeted at a broad user base. The algorithms she developed accelerate and simplify the creation of virtual models across multiple domains, including fashion and product design, and have received funding from industry-leading companies, including Adobe, IBM, and Google. Her work seeks to expand the accessibility of shape design for advanced manufacturing techniques, a research priority identified by the Canadian federal government. In her current work, Dr. Sheffer is exploring the use of virtual and augmented reality interfaces for shape communication.

Dr. Sheffer’s research has had considerable influence on both the research community and the many industries that are using the results of her techniques. Her work is highly cited and many of her papers had been published at top graphics venues, including SIGGRAPH and SIGGRAPH Asia. During her time as a Full Professor at the University of British Columbia, she has helped make the Imager research group one of the strongest computer graphics research groups in the world. Her work has been recognized by a series of prestigious grants and awards, including NSERC I2I grants, faculty awards from IBM, Google and Adobe, an NSERC Discovery Accelerator award, a Killam research fellowship, and an Audi Production Award.

As a recognized leader in the international research community, Dr. Sheffer has an impressive track record of service: she has served as an Associate Editor of all three major computer graphics journals (ACM TOG, IEEE TVCG, and Eurographics CGF), she is a program co-chair for the Eurographics 2018 conference, and she is the general co-chair for the Pacific Graphics’18 and GMP’19 conferences. Previously, Dr. Sheffer has been a program co-chair for both of the top-ranked specialized geometry processing conferences (SGP’06, SMI’13).

Dr. Sheffer holds a dual Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science and Mathematics, a Master’s Degree in Computer Science, and a Doctorate in Computer Science from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She was a post-doctoral fellow in computer science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, after which she held faculty positions at the Technion and the University of British Columbia. In her copious spare time she enjoys cooking, fine dining, and traveling.

March 4, 2018
Kori Inkpen

The 2017 CHCCS/SCDHM Achievement Award of the Canadian Human-Computer Communications Society is presented to Dr. Kori Inkpen for her many contributions to the field of human-computer interaction (HCI), especially her work on collaboration technologies.

Kori Inkpen is a Principal Researcher and Research Manager at Microsoft Research (MSR). After completing her B.Sc. in Computer Science & Mathematics in 1992 at Dalhousie University, she obtained a Ph.D. in Computer Science in 1997 from the University of British Columbia and then held a one-year NSERC Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Human Interface Technology Laboratory at the University of Washington. She became a faculty member in the School of Computing Science at Simon Fraser University in 1998 before moving to Dalhousie University in 2002 as Associate Professor and later Professor in the Faculty of Computer Science. In 2008, she joined Microsoft Research where she has held a number of positions. She currently manages the neXus group that explores Social Computing, Computer-Supported Collaborative Work, and Information Visualization.

Throughout her career, Kori’s work has been characterized by her focus on designing and evaluating computer tools to support collaborative activity and her persistent mentorship of younger researchers. Her doctoral research was a key component of the Electronic Games for Education in Math and Science (E-GEMS) Project. She studied how computer game technology could be used to encourage young children to learn about mathematics and science by playing games together and how subtle changes in the user interface could affect the nature of the collaboration, especially when the affect was different for girls and boys. This began a long-term interest in working with children to better understand their use of technology, both to provide insights into how best to design user interfaces for children, but also to understand how insights gained from watching children explore technology might inform the design of technology for adults. During her doctoral research, she also began mentoring students, especially young women interested in computer science, something she has continued to do throughout her career.

As a new junior faculty member at Simon Fraser, she formed the Edge Lab, re-establishing a strong HCI research presence within the School of Computing Science. She and her students conducted research on a range of important emerging topics that have since become mainstream areas within the field of HCI, including further work with technology for children, early explorations of single-display groupware, and studies of the social aspects of multi-user tabletop collaboration and collaboration across mobile devices. Three of her SFU Edge Lab students are now HCI faculty members at Canadian universities. At Dalhousie, where she re-incarnated the Edge Lab, she expanded her research to look at a variety of interaction techniques for large wall-mounted and tabletop displays, issues of privacy and security specific to collaboration technology, and novel approaches to heterogeneous multi-display environments that integrate collaboration activity using personal hand-held and larger shared displays. Again, several of the students who worked with her in the Dalhousie Edge Lab have since gone on to careers as HCI research faculty in Canadian universities.

After joining the staff at Microsoft Research, Dr. Inkpen’s research shifted from focusing on co-location collaboration to exploring support for remote collaboration. She has continued to look at collaboration technology for children but also focuses on collaboration in the workplace, in the home, and in the general consumer space. She has examined factors affecting the success of video conferencing tools such as gaze, replay, spatialized audio, avatars, and embodied proxies, and has numerous contributions demonstrating the benefit of these advances. Beyond just improving today’s videoconferencing systems, Dr. Inkpen has explored ways to move beyond traditional talking heads videoconferencing to support rich shared experiences and she has explored ways that people can attend events together, watch TV together, and go shopping together. More recently she has been investigating the potential of live video streaming to connect people in new ways. She has also assessed collaboration technology aimed at supporting social engagement for healthcare, learning, entertainment, and leisure time activities. In addition to her many research achievements, she has continued her mentoring activities at MSR include hosting graduate, undergraduate, and high school interns within her research project teams.

Kori has been very active in efforts to support women in computing and in a number of initiatives to increase opportunities for Canadian HCI researchers to engage with each other. She organized the first “Imposter Syndrome” panel at the ACM Grace Hopper 2009 conference, which became a frequent event at Grace Hopper and has now extended beyond the initial panel to many different activities and events focused on women in technology. Kori was a founding member of the Network for Effective Collaboration Technologies through Advanced Research (NECTAR), an NSERC-funded strategic research network (2004-2008) that brought together researchers from six Canadian universities to focus on next-generation collaboration tools. She has been a regular participant in the annual Graphics Interface since 1997 when she presented her first paper, and has contributed to the conference in a number of ways: Program Committee Member for GI 2000, Local Arrangements Co-Chair for GI 2003, HCI Program Co-Chair for GI 2005, and Keynote Speaker for GI 2016.

Dr. Inkpen has published over 100 scientific papers in journals and conferences. She has been named in 20 patents that have been granted or are under review. She is a frequent invited keynote speaker at international conferences and has held numerous senior roles on conference program committees and organizing committees.

When not at work, Kori enjoys spending time with her family and friends, playing sports and travelling. She can often be found watching her daughter Gabi play volleyball, hanging out at the hockey rink with her son Declan, or at the gym with Lorenzo. Her favorite place to relax is at her cottage in Nova Scotia where she spends time every summer with her family.

April 24, 2017
Tom Calvert

Tom Calvert is a visionary scientist, educator, administrator, and a Canadian Digital Media Pioneer. Throughout a long and distinguished career, Professor Tom Calvert has exemplified the spirit of a true digital pioneer. As one of the founding fathers of computer graphics and human-computer interaction research in Canada, his work sits at the interfaces between engineering, computing science, human performance, art, and social science. From academia to industry, he has been exceptional in his ability to connect people and ideas, and his devotion to exploring how technology might improve human activities across a variety of educational, artistic, and health-related fields.

Tom is a true “Renaissance man.” In 45 years at Simon Fraser University, he was – and remains – the only professor to hold a full appointment in three schools: Computing Science, Kinesiology, and Engineering Science, an academic program for which he was one of two co-founders. He was instrumental in the development of science and technology organizations in British Columbia: he served as President of the Science Council of British Columbia; he oversaw the creation of organizations such as the B.C. Software Productivity Centre and he served on many external boards and committees, including Science World, TRIUMF, Discovery Foundation, IBM Centre for Advanced Studies, B.C. Advanced Systems Institute, National Wireless Communication Research Foundation and the Manning Foundation. He was a co-founder of the TeleLearning NCE, SFU’s first hosted Network of Centres of Excellence, and one of the first NCEs to successfully bring together researchers from science and engineering with researchers from the social sciences and humanities to address issues important for Canada through the deployment of digital media technology.

As a researcher, Tom has inspired and guided foundational work in animation, user interfaces, educational and learning technologies, visualization, and tools for performance, composition, and artistic creation. A strong entrepreneurial spirit led to academic-industrial projects and spin-offs founded by students and collaborators in character animation and VR, movement choreography and notation, and educational technology. His impact extends well beyond his personal body of work: he is a motivator and a champion of people who seek to push the envelope of digital media. He has been a strong mentor and a true statesman in creating opportunities for people to pursue their vision: working to ensure that funding, collaborators and structures existed to support others exploring those opportunities.

Distinguishing his career from other notable Canadian academics is Tom’s ongoing commitment to interdisciplinary work. Throughout his career, he has consistently pushed the boundaries of university teaching, administration, and research to recognize and enrich the evolving landscape of digital technologies. For many years, he has been a true champion of art-technology partnerships in research and in practice. His directorship of the graphics and multimedia lab at SFU fostered open dialogue and novel research collaborations among dancers, computer scientists, and kinesiologists that culminated in a digital media start up, Credo Interactive, and a revolutionary choreography tool called Life Forms™ | Dance Forms™ that was used by Merce Cunningham, one of the fathers of American modern dance.

Tom’s vision for art and technology partnerships motivated perhaps his most enduring legacy. Before retiring from SFU in 2000, he co-founded and nurtured an ambitious interdisciplinary educational institution dedicated to integrating art, media, science and technology that eventually became SFU’s School of Interactive Arts + Technology (SIAT) in 2002. SIAT was a bold step in education and research on human-centred technologies. Its novel curriculum is a mix of art, design, psychology, digital media and computer science. Tom had a leadership role in the creation of the professional Masters of Digital Media Program at the cross-institutional Centre for Digital media (SFU, UBC, ECUA+D and BCIT). The programs at SIAT and CDM have enlarged and enriched the landscape of digital media in Canada. Tom’s leadership and vision helped craft and transform the landscape of art and technology partnerships in his 45 years of service to Canadian education, research, and innovation.

Biography

Born and raised in the U.K., Thomas W. G. Calvert earned a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from University College, London, in 1957. He then worked as an instrumentation engineer at the Metals Division of ICI Ltd. in the U.K. and Canadair Ltd. in Montreal from 1957-1961, after which he was a Lecturer at the Western Ontario Institute of Technology from 1961 to 1964. He earned a high school teaching certificate from the Ontario College of Education (now OISE, part of the University of Toronto) in 1963. He earned a master’s degree in electrical engineering at Wayne State University in 1964 and then worked in the department as an Instructor for one year. He earned a doctorate in electrical engineering from Carnegie-Mellon University in 1967, and was an Assistant and then an Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering at CMU for five years before becoming a faculty member at Simon Fraser University in 1972, with appointments in the School of Computing Science, the School of Engineering Science, and the Department of Kinesiology.

Tom served in many leadership positions during his time at Simon Fraser. He was chair of the Department of Kinesiology for two years starting in 1975 and then was Dean of the Faculty of Interdisciplinary Studies from 1977 to 1985, after which he took on the role of Vice President for Research and Information Systems until 1990, when he was granted a leave of absence to become the President of the Science Council of British Columbia. In 1993, he took on the role of Director of the Centre for Systems Science at SFU until he became the Co-leader of the TeleLearning Network of Centres of Excellence from 1996 and Director of Technology in 1999, a position he held until 2002. Before retiring in 2000 from SFU Burnaby as Professor Emeritus, Tom served as VP Research and External Affairs for the newly formed Technical University of British Columbia from 1997 to 2002 and from 1999 to 2002 he also served as President and CEO of TechBC Corporation. When TechBC became the School of Interactive Arts + Technology at SFU Surrey in 2002, Tom served as Acting Director until 2004, after which he continued his research and teaching there as Professor Emeritus.

In addition to his many academic roles, Tom was Founder and Director of Credo Interactive Inc., a successor to Kinetic Effects Research Inc., an SFU spin-off company formed to commercialize his research on dance and choreography. He was VP Software from 2004 to 2006, after which he has continued to serve as President and CEO. He was a member of the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council from 2000 to 2006 and was a member of the Manning Innovation Awards Selection Committee from 1995 to 2009. He is a member of the Board of Examiners of the Association of Professional Engineers and Geoscientists of British Columbia (APEGBC), IEEE, ACM, and Sigma Xi. He received a Meritorious Achievement Award from APEGBC in 1993, a Xerox Canada Forum Award for furthering corporate-university cooperation in 1995, the Science Council of BC Chairman’s Award for Career Achievement in 1997, and the CHCCS Achievement Award in 2006. He was elected a Fellow of the Canadian Academy of Engineering in 1998.

April 12, 2017
Kim Davidson and Greg Hermanovic

Kim Davidson and Greg Hermanovic are entrepreneurs, animation and visual effects technologists, and Canadian Digital Media Pioneers. Kim and Greg co-founded SideFX Software in 1987 after buying the rights to the 3D animation software PRISMS from the receivers for Toronto-based Omnibus Computer Graphics after Omnibus filed for bankruptcy. Kim and Greg had helped develop PRISMS and knew that it had great potential. They had to put their own money into the purchase and borrowed more, which meant they were taking a big risk. But the risk paid off. Under their leadership, SideFX became a world leader in advanced 3D graphics, animation, and visual effects software for their PRISMS and later their Houdini 3D software packages. Both packages provide a procedural building-block architecture that supports simulation of natural phenomena using particle effects and complex three-dimensional models. Houdini has been a mainstay for major film producers in Hollywood and elsewhere for almost three decades.

SideFX is currently the only major Canadian-owned animation software company, tracing its roots back to the early days when Canada was a hotbed for new animation software products. Over the years, the company has provided an opportunity for some of the best and brightest developers to practice their trade in Canada while making an impact on the global entertainment industry with their software releases. PRISMS was written in the C programming language. Its core program was Action, released in 1988. Action was the first to integrate in one program animated motion, modelling, lighting and scripting. The most far-reaching innovation that set PRISMS apart in the industry was the introduction of SOPs (Surface Operators). SOPs were a procedural modelling technology that put a real-time user interface on a family of built-in surface manipulation operators that, prior to Action, were composed laboriously in non-real-time using batch UNIX scripts that ran a separate UNIX process per operator. Action’s SOPs gave immediate visual feedback as the artist worked. With the addition of math expressions that could be put in the surface operators’ parameters, artists could immediately see dynamic 3D shapes animating. This speeded up their workflow, something that was welcomed in the Hollywood film post-production industry. Before Houdini shipped, several modules written in C++ were included as well. These included SAGE for geometry editing, Jive for editing motion channels, Lava for editing materials, Mojo for image morphing, Moca for motion control, and ICE for interactive compositing. The Houdini 3D package combined all these C++ programs into one program and eventually became the successor to PRISMS. Houdini was the first major 3D application to run on Linux.

A number of industry firsts were achieved by SideFX as they brought new ideas from the research community to market in their commercial software packages: first GUI for a procedural modeling system (1987), first expression language in the GUI (1988), first polygon reduction tool and use of “metaballs” as primitives (1989), first particle system and morphing (1992), first integrated motion capture and time frame sampling (1993), first to support NURBS, polygons, and Beziers as “equal citizens” (1995), and first procedural particle system and hierarchical spline models (1998).
SideFX software was quickly adopted by the film industry and later the game industry, in large part because of the flexibility it provides through its procedural approach. In 1997, the film “Titanic” made significant use of SideFX software and “Contact” was one of the first major motion picture films to use Houdini, including for its incredible opening sequence. The film “What Dreams May Come” used Houdini as a primary tool and subsequently won an Oscar for Best Visual Effects in 1999. It was one of many films that were by then relying on SideFX software for visual effects. In recognition of their contribution to the industry, Davidson and Hermanovic and their colleagues have received three awards from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. The first was a Technical Achievement Award from the Academy for their work at SideFX pioneering procedural animation Prisms software in 1998. The second was a Scientific and Engineering Award in 2003 shared with Mark Elendt and Paul Breslin for SideFX’s continued development of the procedural modeling and animation components of Prisms as exemplified in the Houdini software package. A third Academy Award went to SideFX for Andrew Clinton and Mark Elendt’s invention and integration of micro-voxels in the Mantra software.

Biographies

Kim Davidson and Greg Hermanovic met at HCR, an innovative Toronto-based software company that was started by Professor Ron Baecker. They later joined Omnibus Computer Graphics and from there founded Side Effects.

Kim Davidson is a Canadian artist and computer scientist with a passion for computer graphics and animation. Inspired by Saturday-morning cartoons, Davidson built his own animation studio in his parents’ basement when he was a teenager. After deciding to study architecture rather than animation, he earned a double degree in architecture and computer science at the University of Waterloo in 1978. He joined HCR in the early 1980s and Omnibus Computer Graphics as a programmer in 1985 and then in 1987 he co-founded SideFX, where he continues to serve as President and CEO. In addition to the multiple awards he has received with the team at SideFX, Kim received the J.W. Graham Medal from the University of Waterloo’s Faculty of Mathematics in 1999, in recognition of his many contributions to advanced 3D graphics, animation, and special effects. Kim’s love of animation also led him to co-found Catapult Productions in 1992 with Mark Mayerson. Kim served as President and Executive Producer at Catapult for the children’s series “Monster by Mistake” for which Catapult created over 50 half-hour segments that appeared in over 30 countries around the world.

Greg Hermanovic is a Canadian physicist and engineer with a deep interest in developing interactive software tools for artists. After drawing his first pixel on a DEC PDP-11 CRT in 1974 in the Atlantic Ocean on a UN weather research project, he found himself in aerospace engineering helping develop the real-time training simulator for the CanadArm robotic manipulator of the US Space Shuttle. Greg joined HCR in the early 1980s, where he was exposed to the first UNIX operating systems and various computer music languages, and then Omnibus Computer Graphics in 1984, where he served as head of R&D. He co-founded SideFX Software in 1987, where he helped design and engineer PRISMS and Houdini. Greg’s final contribution to Houdini was the CHOPS (Channel Operators) subsystem for procedurally manipulating motion and sound. CHOPS received an industry Innovation Award from Computer Graphics World magazine. Greg’s ultimate goal was to develop artists’ tools that facilitated the authoring and performing of real-time computer-generated visuals co-ordinated with sound and physical devices. He left SideFX in 2000 to found a new company, Derivative, and pursue the nascent market of authoring tools for interactive experiences. Greg currently leads the team at Derivative developing TouchDesigner, now used for diverse applications such as large-scale architectural projection mapping, show control for live performances in music and theatre, immersive audio-visual experiences, experimental art, VR and high-resolution multi-screen video playback. TouchDesigner was used on-set for the films “Gravity” and “Alien Covenant”, by Rush and Nine Inch Nails for real-time tour visuals, and by Walt Disney Imagineering to create interactive animation theme park experiences.

April 12, 2017
Daniel Langlois

Daniel Langlois is an artist-filmmaker-animator, an entrepreneur-philanthropist, and a Canadian Digital Media Pioneer. A native of the Province of Québec, he was inspired by the work of René Jodoin and embarked on a career in computer-assisted animation and computer graphics in the 1970s. He was a film director and animator for eight years, working both for private companies and the National Film Board (NFB) of Canada. While at the NFB he was part of the team that produced the film “Transitions” ‐ the world’s first Imax-format stereoscopic 3-D computer animation ‐ which debuted at Expo 86 in Vancouver. In parallel with his work at the NFB, he and co-director Philippe Bergeron produced the independent animated short film “Tony de Peltrie” with Pierre Lachapelle and Pierre Robidoux in 1985. The film earned several international awards and was noted for its highly realistic character animation.

Building on these successes, Langlois and Char Davies co-founded the animation software company Softimage in 1986 to market the Softimage Creative Environment, which later became Softimage 3D, the first commercial software with inverse kinematics character animation. He led Montréal-based Softimage for over a decade, serving as its first president and chief technology officer. Softimage was one of a handful of highly successful Canadian companies that helped launch the digital revolution in animation and special effects. Softimage software has been used in many top films, including “Jurassic Park,” “The Mask,” “The Matrix,” “Men in Black,” “Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace,” and “Titanic.” The Softimage was especially noted for the level of support it provided for character animation, which set it apart from many of its competitors.

In 1994, Langlois negotiated the sale of Softimage to Microsoft Corporation, the first step in an industry-wide change that saw high-end workstations with custom graphics systems replaced by more affordable personal computers that eventually utilized off-the-shelf commodity graphics processors. This change revolutionized the field of animation and special effects software that in turn triggered major consolidation within the industry. Avid purchased Softimage from Microsoft in 1998 and later sold the 3D animation assets to Autodesk in 2008, which incorporated many of the features into their products.

After Softimage was acquired by Microsoft, Langlois actively pursued his interest in the nexus of art and technology by supporting a variety of causes. He founded a private philanthropic organization, the Daniel Langlois Foundation, with the goal of fostering critical awareness of technology in art and science. He later founded Ex-Centris, a state-of-the-art, avant-garde complex in Montréal dedicated to the support of independent creators and producers experimenting with the new generation of cinematographic tools, and Media Principia / Studio Ex-Centris, a digital film production company focused on evolving digital production technologies. He also founded 357c, a private, non-profit establishment located in a landmark nineteenth century building that originally housed the Port of Montréal Commissary head office. 357c promotes interaction between the business and cultural communities, and hosts the Salons de la Commune and other cultural events.

Biography

Mr. Langlois was born and raised in Québec. He earned a bachelor of design degree from the Université du Québec à Montréal. Ernst & Young identified him as Canada’s national entrepreneur of the year in 1994. He was awarded a Scientific and Technical Oscar by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts in 1997. He was named a Knight of the National Order of Québec in 1999 and an Officer of the Order of Canada in 2000. In 2003, he was awarded the Octas Prize as a Great Pioneer in Information and Communications Technologies (ITC) for the integration of advanced digital technologies in film and media creation. The City of Montréal recognized him as a Personnalité Arts-Affaires in 2000 and the Board of Trade of Metropolitan Montréal subsequently celebrated him as a “Great Montrealer.” He has received honorary doctoral degrees from a number of universities, including Concordia University, McGill University, Université d’Ottawa, Université du Québec à Montréal, and Université de Sherbrooke. His many artistic, entrepreneurial, and philanthropic activities have made lasting contributions to Montréal and to Canada.

April 12, 2017
Kellogg S. Booth

Kellogg Booth’s career has been dominated by an unwavering belief that Canada – and its researchers, artists and companies – could make a serious and positive impact on the evolution of digital media. It is his relentless pursuit of this vision that makes him a true Canadian Digital Media Pioneer.

On paper, Kellogg Booth would appear to be a computer scientist. Strictly speaking, having done his MA (1970) and doctorate (1975) in that field, that is a true statement. However, an examination of how he has conducted his career makes it clear that that characterization is far too limited. His colleagues and students were as likely to be artists, designers, social scientists or entrepreneurs as software or hardware engineers. Interdisciplinary research has been fundamental to his work, reflecting his deep conviction that digital technologies were best viewed in terms of their human, social and cultural context. Yes, technological innovation has been a key part of his work, but the vision was always on technological innovation’s place in the larger mosaic of human society.

This is evident right from the start of his career in Canada when, between 1977-1990, along with John Beatty, and later Richard Bartels and other colleagues, he helped make the University of Waterloo one of the top centres of excellence in computer graphics in the country – which Rick Beach, his first PhD student, co-supervised with Beatty, described as “a welcome oasis for Canadian computer graphics research.” On moving to the University of British Columbia (UBC), he became the founding Director of the Media and Graphics Interdisciplinary Centre (MAGIC), which bridged across the many different faculties within the university, as well as to outside organizations – especially in the arts.

In 2004, Booth helped to organise a cross-disciplinary network of seven Canadian universities to develop design-oriented analyses of what people do and need in various organizational settings, and then to create technologies, products, and provide studies to disseminate the results of their experiments: the Network for Effective Collaboration Technology through Advanced Research (NECTAR). During the five years of this network, Booth served as associate director and led the UBC-based activities.

On the completion of NECTAR, he moved immediately into leading a core team of academic researchers and partners from industry and the public sector that organized a Network of Centres of Excellence: Graphics, Animation and New Media Canada (GRAND), for which he was the scientific director from December 2009 to June 2015.

Today, he is still an active researcher and professor at UBC, and as much of an activist in helping the country meet its potential in digital media, including serving as a director on the board of Wavefront, a government, academic and corporate consortium devoted to accelerating the growth and impact of Canadian wireless innovation, as well as an adjunct professor at the Centre for Digital Media (CDM), a centre run jointly by the British Columbia Institute of Technology, Emily Carr University of Art and Design, UBC, and Simon Fraser University.

Along the way, Booth has authored/co-authored first rate research papers on collaboration technology, HCI, interaction techniques, computer graphics and animation, and he has mentored numerous students (and artists).

In 1991, Booth offered some advice to students in the SIGGRAPH Career Handbook. It included “Choose a school and a department where you will have good colleagues. It is difficult to work alone. In computer graphics it is very difficult to work alone.” In a way, his career is the mirror image of this advice. By being a great colleague himself, and by setting the bar thus, attracting more of the same, and therefore almost never having to work alone – or without a smile – he has opened doors for others.

It is hard to imagine a single individual working in the field over the past 40 years who has done as much to foster Canadian excellence in new media research than Kellogg Booth. He has consistently been a selfless advocate, leader, mentor, and practitioner in the field. As such, he is a true Canadian Digital Media Pioneer.

Biography

Dr. Kellogg S. Booth is a Professor of Computer Science at the University of British Columbia. His research interests, which date back to 1968, include human-computer interaction, computer-supported cooperative work, user interface design, visualization, computer graphics, and the analysis of algorithms.

He received his BS in mathematics in 1968 from Caltech, and his MA in 1970 and doctorate in 1975 from the University of California Berkeley, both in computer science. In parallel with graduate school, he worked at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, where he was a staff member from 1968-1976. In 1977 he came to Canada, where he joined the faculty of the Department of Computer Science at the University of Waterloo. In 1990 he moved to the University of British Columbia, where he has been ever since. His energy shows no sign of waning – his Berkeley-acquired activism seemingly as strong as ever.

Throughout his career, Booth has been involved in a number of interdisciplinary research projects. He was founding director of MAGIC, the Media and Graphics Interdisciplinary Centre at UBC (1990-2002), and served for five years as associate director of the federally funded Network for Collaboration Technology through Advanced Research (NECTAR), and then five years as scientific director of Graphics, Animation and New Media Canada (GRAND), a federally funded Network of Centres of Excellence.

He has been a visiting scientist at Tektronix Laboratories (1980), a visiting professor at the University of California Santa Cruz (1985), and an adjunct scientist at the New Media Innovation Centre of British Columbia (2001-2002). He is a former chair of ACM SIGGRAPH (1985-89), and served as conference co-chair for SIGGRAPH ’83 and as the past chair of the organization (1989-93). He has served on numerous conference program committees including the ACM CHI, I3D, SIGGRAPH, and UIST conferences, and of course the Canadian Graphics Interface for which he served as general co-chair in 1992, co-chair of the program committee in 1998, and general chair in 2005. He has received numerous awards, including being a fellow of the British Columbia Advanced Systems Institute from 1992-2004, receiving the Canadian Human-Computer Communication Society’s Achievement Award in 2008, being named an ACM Distinguished Scientist in 2009, and receiving the ACM SIGGRAPH Outstanding Service Award in 2010.

Selected Works

Nobarany, S, Booth, KS, & Hsieh, G (2015). What motivates people to review papers? The case for the human-computer interaction community. J. Association for Information Science and Technology.

Shoemaker, GA, Tsukitani, T, Kitamura, Y, & Booth, KS (2012) Two-part models capture the impact of gain on pointing performance. ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction, 19(4) 28 pages.

Fernquist, J, Shoemaker, GA, & Booth, KS (2011). “Oh snap”: Helping users align digital objects on touch interfaces. In Proceedings of INTERACT 2011.

Lanir, J, Booth, KS, & Hawkey, K (2010). The benefits of more electronic screen space on students’ retention of material in classroom lectures. Computers and Education, 55(2):892-903.

Hendy, JC, Booth, KS, & Hawkey, JL (2010). Graphically enhanced keyboard accelerators for GUIs. Proceedings of Graphics Interface. 2010. Ottawa, Ontario. May 31 – June 1, pp. 3-10.

Lanir, J, Booth, KS, & Tang, AT (2008). MultiPresenter: a presentation system for (very) large display surfaces. In Proceeding of the 16th ACM international Conference on Multimedia. Vancouver, British Columbia. October 26-31, pp. 519-528.

Shoemaker, G, Tang, AT, & Booth, KS (2007). Shadow Reaching: A new perspective on interaction for large wall displays. In Proceedings of UIST 2007 – The 20th Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology, October 7-10, Providence, RI, pp. 53-56.

Zheng, Q, McGrenere, JL, & Booth, KS (2006). Co-authoring with structured annotations. In Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing (CHI 2006). Montreal, Quebec, April 22-27, pp. 131-141.

Booth, KS, Fisher, BD, Lin, CJR, & Argue, R (2002). The “Mighty Mouse” multi-screen collaboration tool. In Proceedings of UIST 2002 – The 15th Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology, October 27-30, Paris, France, pp. 209-212.

Scharein, RG, Booth, KS, & Little, JJ (2000). Interactive knot theory with KnotPlot. Workshop on Multimedia Tools for Communicating Mathematics. Lisbon, Portugal (November 23-25). Appears in Borwein, J, Morales, MH, Polthier, K, & Rodrigues, JF, editors (2002). Multimedia Tools for Communicating Mathematics. Springer-Verlag: Berlin, Germany, p 277-290.

MacKenzie, CL, Booth, KS, Dill, JC, Inkpen, KM, & Payandeh, S (2000). Evaluating human goal-directed activities in virtual and augmented environments . Proceedings of International Ergonomics Association. (IEA2000)/Human Factors and Ergonomics Society (HFES2000) Congress: Ergonomics for the New Millennium, 1(546).

Arthur, KW, Booth, K S, & Ware, C (1993). 3D task performance in fish tank virtual worlds. ACM Transactions on Information Systems, Special Issue on Virtual Worlds, 11(3):239-265.

Booth, KS, Cowan, WB, Wein, C, & Wein, M (1991). Hardware support for multitasking graphics. Proceedings of Graphics Interface ‘91 (pp. 199-206). Calgary, Alberta.

Booth, KS, Bryden, MP, Cowan, WB, Morgan, MF, & Plante, BL (1987). On the parameters of human visual performance: An investigation of the benefits of antialiasing. IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications, 7(11):34-41.

Booth, KS, Forsey, DR, & Paeth, AW (1986). Hardware assistance for z-buffer visible surface algorithms. IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications, 6(11):31-39.

Beach, RJ, Beatty, JC, Booth, KS, Plebon, DA, & Fiume, EL (1982). The message is the medium: Multiprocess structuring of an interactive paint program. Ninth Annual Conference on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques, ACM SIGGRAPH ‘82 (pp. 277-287). Boston, Massachusetts.

Wetherall, CS, Buckholtz, TJ, & Booth, KS (1972). A director for Kriegspiel, a variant of chess. The Computer Journal, 15(1):66-70.

May 4, 2016