RBC and the University of Toronto recently partnered up to create the RBC Innovation Fellowship program, a joint venture designed to recognize exceptional faculty and graduate students and to provide them with additional resources to advance their research.

This year’s RBC Research Prize Winners are Gerald Penn and Cosmin Munteanu.

The faculty members also gave a brief overview of their winning proposal:

“One of the interesting challenges we’re facing is that everyone’s jumping on the AI bandwagon, but we don’t have a very good human interface for it yet. In the finance world, for example, high-level financial analysts these are people who do long-term planning for large investment firms or banks €“ still use pen and paper. It’s shock from a tech perspective. There’s nothing wrong with it per se, but they’re not benefitting from all these machine learning and NLP advances. The essence of our proposal is to make sure these people can benefit from the technology and to address the problem that the software currently available to support these tasks isn’t designed well for their purposes.”

Full interviews and more details about the winning proposals are available on the RBC Institute for Research website.

Anind Dey:
Routines and Behaviors: Leveraging everyday routines to enhance interactive systems

2017-11-07 12:30 at MaRS

Abstract

More information about the 2017/2018 Tux presentation series is available on the official Tux website

Faculty Appointments 2017/2018

We’re thrilled to welcome the next wave of U of T computer science faculty, many of whom are jointly appointed with cognate departments, enabling us to significantly expand computer sciences collaborations with multiple disciplines across campus.”

Ravin Balakrishnan, Professor & Chair

On January 19th, 2016, Michelle Annett was presented with the L’Oreal-UNESCO for Women in Science-NSERC Postdoctoral Fellowship Supplement Award. UNESCO and L’Oreal invited the top 3% of female post-docs that have received an NSERC PDF Award to apply for this award, and from those applicants Michelle was selected as the single winner.

The award was presented to her personally by Mario Pinto, president of NSERC. The Canadian minister of science, Kirsty Duncan, also read over Michelle’s biography and offered her congratulations. The event took place at the French embassy in Ottawa. Both before and after the award ceremony, Michelle had the opportunity to talk with many members of the embassy, NSERC, and other high-level academics across Canada (e.g., the presidents of the University of Ottawa, the University of Calgary). There were nearly 200 attendees, whom she had a chance to speak with about her research, Autodesk Research, U of T, U of A, and the importance of computer science in general.

This was not only a great experience for Michelle, but it let her shed a positive light on Autodesk, U of T, U of A, and HCI research at a national and international level.

As an animator, I’m trying to animate realistically, says Chris Landreth, Academy Award winning animator and filmmaker and now distinguished research artist-in-residence in the University of Toronto’s department of computer science. Read the full article at http://news.utoronto.ca/oscar-winning-animator-and-filmmaker-chris-landreth-u-t-computer-science.

The Department of Computer Science, Faculty of Arts & Science and Faculty of Medicine are pleased to announce and invite the U of T community to a special lecture by Chris Landreth, a Distinguished Research Artist. The lecture will take place on Wednesday, January 27 at the Bahen Centre for Information Technology, 40 St. George Street, Room 5166 4:15 to 5:15 PM, there will be a Q&A 5:15 – 6:30 PM. RSVP for the event at http://web.cs.toronto.edu/news/landrethlecture.htm.

Bill Polson will be speaking about design patterns in computer graphics at BA 1210 on October 22. The talk begins at 7pm, but doors will open at 6:45.

BIO

Bill is currently on leave from Pixar, working on a book on Pipeline Design Patterns, which should be out in mid-2016. At Pixar, Bill was the Director of Industry Strategy, where he was responsible for Pixar’s relationship to the graphics industry. In this role he has shaped the product roadmaps of major graphics software vendors. He is the originator of Pixar’s OpenSubdiv effort, which is redefining how the industry handles high order geometry. Bill has had a number of management roles at Pixar, including Lead of Production Engineering, and Supervising Technical Director of Short Films. Prior to that Bill was a TD and software developer. Bill is active in SIGGRAPH, where he originated the popular new program SIGGRAPH Dailies!

TITLE

Pipeline Design Patterns

ABSTRACT

In his talk, Bill will use a simple example to illustrate the common problems of graphics pipelines: getting assets built (in lots of variations), getting them converted to optimized representations and aggregated into shots and levels, and generally carrying edits from modeling through to animation/gameplay and beyond to rendering/display. The talk will discuss the general shape of these problems and their solutions, and will propose some common vocabulary.

On October 13th, MaRS Discovery District will welcome Hrvoje Benko, who will be presenting at TUX. Lunch reception begins at 12:30pm in the Auditorium and the lecture at 1:00pm. Anyone interested in attending should RSVP via email with Grace Chen at gchen@dgp.toronto.edu.

BIO

Hrvoje Benko is a Senior Researcher at Microsoft Research. He explores novel interactive computing technologies and their impact on human-computer interaction. In particular, his research interests include augmented reality, touch and gesture-based interfaces, depth sensing, and display technologies. He helped found and lead the Microsoft Touch Mouse project and he has extensively collaborated with the Surface Computing group at Microsoft. He has been active in the human-computer interaction field, authoring more than 50 scientific papers and journal articles, as well as serving as the General Chair (2014) and the Program Chair (2012) of the ACM Conference on User Interface Systems and Technology (UIST). For his publications, he received several best paper awards at both ACM UIST and ACM SIGCHI. Before joining Microsoft, he obtained his PhD at Columbia University. More detail can be found on his website:http://research.microsoft.com/~benko/.

PhD Candidate and DGP member Rorik Henrikson was recently featured in the U of T news, exploring his research. Adopting his early interest in stage, film and television planning, he created Storeoboard – his stereoscopic 3D storyboard software. Storeoboard was recently used by Canadian director and filmmaker Dylan Pearce in the planning of 40 Below and Falling, the first stereoscopic 3D romantic comedy.

You can read more about it here.

Their work on improving the depth-sensing cameras has been published in the New York Times. The article can be found here.