Invited Speakers

Dr. Agarwal earned his PhD in Computer Science from the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences at New York University. He joined Duke University in 1989 where he is now the Chair and Professor of Computer Science and Professor of Mathematics. His research interests include geometric algorithms and data structures, computational molecular biology, spatial databases, global change, geographic information systems, sensor networks, and robotics. He has authored four books, and more than 250 scholarly articles in various journals, edited volumes, and international conferences. He has received many awards, including National Young Investigator, Sloan Fellow, and ACM Fellow, and he serves on the editorial boards of a number of journals.

Tony DeRose is currently a Senior Scientist and lead of the Research Group at Pixar Animation Studios. He received a BS in Physics in 1981 from the University of California, Davis; in 1985 he received a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of California, Berkeley. From September 1986 to December 1995 Dr. DeRose was a Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Washington. In 1998, he was a major contributor to the Oscar winning short film "Geri's game", in 1999 he received the ACM SIGGRAPH Computer Graphics Achievement Award, and in 2006 he received a Scientific and Technical Academy Award for his work on surface representations.

Craig Gotsman received a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 1991. He is a professor in the Department of Computer Science at the Technion - Israel Institute of Technology, working in 3D computer graphics, geometric modeling and computational geometry, and a co-founder of the Technion Center for Graphics and Geometric Computing (CGGC), which houses three faculty and dozens of graduate students. Prof. Gotsman has published over 100 papers in the professional literature and served on the Editorial Boards of ACM Transactions on Graphics, IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics and Computer-Aided Geometric Design. He is also a frequent member of the leading graphics and geometry conference program committees. Beyond frequent consulting for industry leaders such as Hewlett-Packard, Johnson & Johnson, Autodesk, Shell Oil and Nokia, Prof. Gotsman has co-founded three companies, one (Virtue 3D Inc.) that commercialized his academic research on compression of 3D geometric data. Prof. Gotsman spent the two academic years of 2004-5 on sabbatical at Harvard University and MIT, and the summer of 2006 at INRIA Sophia Antipolis.