The SIGGRAPH Pioneers group is proud to announce our Featured Speakers for 2024.
This year for the first time, the Pioneers will host a panel of Featured Speakers, as a tribute to the Pioneers of the North Carolina Research Triangle! Our panel will include Nick England, Henry Fuchs, Turner Whitted, and Mary Whitton, all of whom have worked for a long time variously at NC State, Duke and UNC, in the triangle area defined by Raleigh, Durham and Chapel Hill.
The Pioneers Reception will be held on Tuesday, July 30, from 5:45 to 6:45 pm at the Denver Convention Center, in the Educator Forum Rooms 205-207. For the first time, the Pioneers Featured Speakers session will be open to all conference attendees!
Prior to the panelist session, there will be a private Social Hour, from 4:30 – 5:30 pm in nearby Room 201, with light refreshments and a cash bar. Admittance will be limited to Pioneer members and a guest. The conference registration badge will indicate Pioneer membership.
The SIGGRAPH Pioneers is a network of researchers, developers, artists, and educators who have been working in the fields of computer graphics and interactive techniques for at least 20 years. Many members have been in the field since its beginnings more than 50 years ago. The Pioneers hold annual receptions at the SIGGRAPH conference as an informal get-together with old friends, and to hear remarks from a Featured Speaker whose career had a profound influence on the field. Our four panelists join a pantheon of recent speakers, including authors James Foley and Andries van Dam, future technologist Ken Perlin, scientific visualization artist Donna Cox, effects wizard Douglas Trumbull, production pioneer Jeff Kleiser, CGI researcher Jim Blinn, co-founder of PIXAR Alvy Ray Smith, and CGI Art pioneer David Em.
-Ed Kramer
Chair, SIGGRAPH Pioneers
Panelist Bios:
Henry Fuchs
(PhD, Utah, 1975) Henry Fuchs is the Federico Gil Distinguished Professor of Computer Science and Adjunct Professor of Biomedical Engineering at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he leads UNC’s Graphics and Virtual Reality Research Group. He has been active in 3D computer graphics and computer vision, with rendering algorithms (BSP Trees), high performance graphics hardware (Pixel-Planes), office of the future, virtual and augmented reality, telepresence, and medical applications. He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a fellow of the ACM, a Life Fellow of the IEEE, recipient of the ACM SIGGRAPH Steven Anson Coons Award, and an honorary doctorate from TU Wien, the Vienna Institute of Technology
Turner Whitted
Turner Whitted received BS and MS degrees in Electrical Engineering from Duke University in 1969 and 1970 respectively. In 1975 he enrolled full time as a student at North Carolina State University and received a PhD in Electrical Engineering in 1978 after which he joined Bell Labs as a member of the technical staff working on a number of research projects including recursive ray tracing. Later he co-founded Numerical Design Limited and simultaneously taught as an adjunct faculty member at the University of North Carolina, and in 1997 he began a 15 year term at Microsoft Research. After a brief retirement he joined NVIDIA’s research group. Since 2018 he has been fully retired except for adjunct faculty positions at North Carolina State University and the University of North Carolina. His projects have ranged from text rendering, game engines, and procedural geometry to low latency hardware for AR. He has served on the editorial boards of IEEE CG&A and ACM TOG, as papers chair for SIGGRAPH ’97, and as a member of the SIGGRAPH Executive Committee. He is a recipient of the ACM SIGGRAPH Achievement Award and Steven Anson Coons Award. He is a Fellow of ACM and IEEE and is a member of the National Academy of Engineering.
Nick England
I got introduced to interactive 3D graphics in 1972 in John Staudhammer’s lab at NC State. Designed a programmable graphics processor which was the foundation for Ikonas Graphics Systems in 1978. Later co-founded Trancept Systems. Both companies were acquired by larger companies but engineering stayed in NC – I got my Delta Airlines million-miler award thanks to Sun Microsystems. Worked on PixelFlow project at UNC-CH starting in 1993, then in 2000 founded 3rdTech Inc to commercialize several technologies developed there. Now retired to restoring vintage Navy radio and teletype equipment. Still located in NC.
Mary Whitton
Mary Whitton studied at both Duke and NC State and had a distinguished 25-year career as a research professor at UNC Chapel Hill. She got involved with interactive computer graphics in 1976, in John Staudhammer’s lab at NC State. She was a co-founder of Ikonas Graphics Systems (1978) and Trancept Systems (1987). These companies’ products were high-end user-programmable hardware with software libraries for graphics, image processing, volume rendering, and visualization. At UNC she co-led the Effective Virtual Environments research group, and she received the IEEE Visualization and Graphics Technical Community (VGTC) Virtual Reality Career Award in 2021. She was Chair of the ACM SIGGRAPH organization 1993-1995 and received the ACM SIGGRAPH Outstanding Service Award in 2013.
