Get to Know the Final Slate of SIGGRAPH 2021 Featured Speakers

CHICAGO, July 22, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- SIGGRAPH 2021 announces the final wave of featured speakers participating in the upcoming virtual conference, presented by partners of the event. Featured speaker sessions will take place during the live week of the conference, 9–13 August.

Featured speaker sessions at SIGGRAPH 2021 offer a chance for industry experts to discuss some of the most prominent topics in computer graphics and interactive techniques. This final slate of speakers joins six already-announced talks from 3Blue1Brown's Grant Sanderson, MIT Media Lab's Dr. Kate Darling, University of California, Berkeley Professor Hany Farid, The SPA Studios' Sergio Pablos, Skydance Media's Amy Hennig, and ACM A.M. Turing Award winners Ed Catmull and Pat Hanrahan.

"We cannot wait for attendees to experience these incredible talks from our partners," said SIGGRAPH 2021 Conference Chair Pol Jeremias-Vila, of Pixar Animation Studios. "Each speaker brings with them an impressive background across everything from media and entertainment to rendering and immersive technologies."

Eric Iverson, CTO of media and entertainment at Amazon Web Services (AWS), will join SIGGRAPH 2021 bringing over 21 years of experience leading technology strategy at a multitude of organizations, including Creative Artists Agency and Sony Pictures. In a session titled "Through the Looking Glass: The Next Reality for Content Production", Iverson will speak to new ways studios are accelerating content-creation pipelines and will be joined by guests from Amazon Studios, Company 3, Epic Games, Netflix, and Weta Digital.

Next up, Jim Jeffers, senior principal engineer and director of advanced rendering and visualization at Intel, leads design and development of Intel's oneAPI Rendering Toolkit. For his session, "High-fidelity Ray Tracing Pushing New Boundaries", Jeffers will share what his team is doing to meet current demands and deliver powerful ray tracing and rendering through a comprehensive, flexible, and scalable end-to-end platform and open, heterogenous programming.

"I am excited to deliver this keynote and discuss our efforts to bring a wide range of choice, flexibility, and open, heterogeneous development that is performant, productive, and standardized for cross-platform usage," shared Jeffers. "This pushes new boundaries for a wide array of GPU and CPU platform applications, while maintaining the open environments that best serve the community."

Richard Kerris is vice president of Omniverse platform development and general manager of media and entertainment at NVIDIA. During SIGGRAPH 2021, Kerris will be joined by guest speakers to discuss "Graphics, AI, and the Emergence of Shared Worlds" in a session that highlights both organizations' long history of innovation.

Last but not least, Timoni West, vice president of augmented, virtual, and mixed reality tools at Unity, is at the forefront of creating tools that improve cognition and intent, digitally augmented social and physical spaces, applied machine learning, and hardware for new mediums. In her session, "Omni, Meta, Uni, and All the Other Verses You Care About", she will share her thoughts about what's preventing the community from diving in head first and understanding whether the elements of a tri-metaverse may already be here.

For full bios on each featured speaker, please visit our website.

Access to featured speaker sessions is open to all virtual pass levels. Register for SIGGRAPH 2021 at s2021.SIGGRAPH.org/register.

About ACM, ACM SIGGRAPH, and SIGGRAPH 2021 
ACM, the Association for Computing Machinery, is the world's largest educational and scientific computing society, uniting educators, researchers, and professionals to inspire dialogue, share resources, and address the field's challenges. ACM SIGGRAPH is a special interest group within ACM that serves as an interdisciplinary community for members in research, technology, and applications in computer graphics and interactive techniques. The SIGGRAPH conference is the world's leading annual interdisciplinary educational experience showcasing the latest in computer graphics and interactive techniques.  SIGGRAPH 2021, the 48th annual conference hosted by ACM SIGGRAPH, will take place virtually with live events 9–13 August and on-demand content available starting 2 August through 29 October. Click here for news from the conference and its partners.

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SOURCE SIGGRAPH