Member Profile: Richard J. Rabbitz
1. What do you do, and how long have you been doing it?
I am an Assistant Teaching Professor at Rowan University. I teach the following courses: Computer Graphics, Computer Animation, Computer Vision, Introduction to Objected Oriented Programming, and Object Oriented Programming/Data Abstraction. I have been teaching courses at Rowan since 2014. I became a full-time faculty member in the Fall of 2022. Prior to that I was a Principal Member of the Engineering Staff at Lockheed Martin where I was a subject matter expert in NVIDIA GPUs, Virtual Reality, and Augmented Reality. I began my career there in 1982.
2. What was your first job?
My first job was in 1980 as an intern with Honeywell Computers in Los Angeles. I worked as a software tester for their APL and BASIC programming languages.
3. Where did you complete your formal education?
I received my BS degree in computer science from West Chester University where Dr. John Weaver was my advisor. I received my MSE degree in computer science from the University of Pennsylvania where Dr. Norm Badler was my advisor.
4. How did you first get involved with ACM SIGGRAPH?
In 1983 my manager Jerry Golub helped me get funding to attend my first SIGGRAPH conference in Detroit. I have attended just about every SIGGRAPH conference since then.
5. What is your favorite memory of a SIGGRAPH conference?
My first memorable moment was showing content I created at Lockheed Martin in the Silicon Graphics booth on the SIGGRAPH exhibition floor. My team built a 3D digital mockup of a navy ship with an SGI tool called the OpenGL Optimizer. My next most memorable moment was creating a video at Lockheed Martin using the NVIDIA IRay path tracer tool. That video was shown in a loop at the top the NVIDIA booth on the SIGGRAPH exhibition floor. In 2019, 2023, and 2024 I had the pleasure of attending SIGGRAPH with my son Michael Rabbitz.
6. Describe a project that you would like to share with the ACM SIGGRAPH community.
One of the last projects I did at Lockheed Martin was create a digital twin of one of the navy ships that LM was the system integrator for. That had a Virtual Reality component to it that proved to be a very useful engineering tool when integrating the components of the combat system into the ship.
7. If you could have dinner with one living or non-living person, who would it be and why?
I would have dinner with Dr. John Weaver my advisor from West Chester University who passed away in 2023. I would thank him for giving me my very first computer graphics projects using APL and a Tektronix 4014 graphics terminal.
8. What is something most people don’t know about you?
I got to play a little college football as a QB at West Chester University.
9. From which single individual have you learned the most in your life? What did they teach you?
I learned the most in my life from my father. He taught me how hard work and dedication can pay off. He also taught me taught me to find a passion in life and then try to make a living out of it. That is exactly what I did with computer graphics.
10. Is there someone in particular who has influenced your decision to work with ACM SIGGRAPH?
Jerry Golub who was my first manager when I started my Lockheed Martin career in 1982. At the time we were RCA. He helped me get approval to attend the SIGGRAPH conference in Detroit in 1983, and also convinced me to become a member of SIGGRAPH.
11. What can you point to in your career as your proudest moment?
The proudest moment was when I did a real-time demonstration of an Augmented Reality (AR) product that I helped create using the Microsoft Hololens AR headset. The demo took place at Lockheed Martin headquarters in Bethesda Maryland. The demo was to then Lockheed Martin CEO Marillyn Hewson and the board of directors. The demo was very well received and it showed the executive team the many productive use cases for a disruptive technology like Augmented Reality.