Keynotes Speakers

A wide-spread adoption of 3D printing is democratizing manufacturing. The ever expanding range of printing materials allows for fabrication of complex multi-material objects that cannot be manufactured using any other method. However, while there has been tremendous progress in the development of the output devices, the provided digital content creation software, algorithms, and tools are largely underdeveloped. The overall situation is analogous to the digital printing and content creation revolution of the early 1980s before the advent of PostScript.

In this talk, I will describe abstractions that are necessary to scale the complexity of the 3D printed models. First, I will present OpenFab - a direct specification pipeline for multi-material fabrication - inspired by the programmable pipelines used for film and real-time rendering. The pipeline introduces user-programmable fablets - procedures evaluated for each point inside of the object volume that return material composition. The system is designed to stream an arbitrary number of voxels with a fixed and controllable memory footprint. As an alternative to directly specifying material composition, it is often more natural to specify an object by defining its functional goal (e.g., specific color, stiffness, or refractive index).

I will present Spec2Fab - a computationally efficient and general process for translating functional requirements to fabricable 3D prints. Spec2Fab provides an abstraction mechanism that simplifies the design, development, implementation, and reuse of fabrication algorithms. I will demonstrate a variety of applications that take advantage of both systems.

Wojciech Matusik

Wojciech Matusik is an Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at MIT, where he leads the Computational Fabrication Group. Before coming to MIT, he worked at Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories, Adobe Systems, and Disney Research Zurich. He studied computer graphics at MIT and received his PhD in 2003. He also received a BS in EECS from the University of California at Berkeley in 1997 and MS in EECS from MIT in 2001.
His research interests are in direct digital manufacturing and computer graphics. In 2004, he was named one of the world's top 100 young innovators by MIT's Technology Review Magazine. In 2009, he received the Significant New Researcher Award from ACM Siggraph. In 2012, Matusik received the DARPA Young Faculty Award and he was named a Sloan Research Fellow.

Digital technologies are now mature for producing high quality digital replicas of Cultural Heritage (CH) artifacts. The research results produced in the last two decades has shown an impressive evolution and consolidation of the technologies for acquiring high-quality digital 3D models, encompassing both geometry and color (or, better, surface reflectance properties); technologies for the interactive visualization of complex models and the integration of different media have been also an important subject of research. In this talk, I will present the more recent progresses, focusing on practical solutions which aim at a major impact in real applications. The talk will also try to give a glance into the near future, demonstrating how geometry processing and visualization could become a major instrument in the study and dissemination of our heritage.

Roberto Scopigno

Roberto Scopigno is a Research Director at ISTI, an Institute of the Italian National Research Council (CNR) located in Pisa, and leads the Visual Computer Lab. He graduated in Computer Science at the University of Pisa in 1984, and has been involved in Computer Graphics since then.
He is currently engaged in several EU and national research projects concerned with multiresolution data modeling and rendering, 3D digitization/scanning, scientific visualization, geometry processing, virtual reality and applications to Cultural Heritage.
He published more than two hundreds papers in international refereed journals/conferences with Google Scholar h-index 39 and more than 7100 citations. He presented invited lectures or courses at several international conferences. He was Co-Chair of several international conferences and served in the program committees of international events.
Since 2012 he is Editor In Chief of the ACM Journal of Computing and Cultural Heritage; he served as Editor in Chief of the journal "Computer Graphics Forum" (2001-2010). He is member of Eurographics, served as elected member of the Eurographics Executive Committee since 2001 and was the Eurographics Chairman on 2009-2010. He is recipient of several awards, including the EG Outstanding Technical Contribution Award (2008) and the Tartessos Virtual Archeology Award (2011).

Since the days of Walt himself when Disney animation was first invented, the technical limitations of the animation pipeline have had a strong influence on the style of animation that can be achieved in a professional production environment. The Disney Research Zurich Animation Group strives to bypass technical barriers in the production pipeline with new algorithms that expand the designer’s creative toolbox in terms of depiction, movement, deformation, stylization, control, and efficiency. Disney's five animation studios, targeting feature-length animated films, animated television content, and high-end visual effects, offer a varied set of challenges and opportunities. In this talk, I will highlight Disney Research Zurich's efforts to advance research in the field of animation inspired by the unique needs of these unique studios.

Robert Sumner

Dr. Robert Sumner is the Associate Director of Disney Research Zurich and an Adjunct Professor at ETH Zurich. At DRZ, Robert leads the lab’s research on animation and interactive graphics. His research group strives to bypass technical barriers in the animation production pipeline with new algorithms that expand the designer’s creative toolbox in terms of depiction, movement, deformation, stylization, control, and efficiency. Robert received a B.S. (1998) degree in computer science from the Georgia Institute of Technology and his M.S. (2001) and Ph.D. (2005) from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He spent three years as a postdoctoral researcher at ETH Zurich before joining Disney. At ETH, Robert teaches a course called the Game Programming Laboratory in which students work in small teams to design and implement novel video games.