Brief Biography

Eugene Fiume is Professor and Dean of the Faculty of Applied Sciences at Simon Fraser University. He is the former Chair of Department of Computer Science at the University of Toronto, where he continues to supervise students as Professor Emeritus. He is past Director of the Masters of Science in Applied Computing programme, and was Principal Investigator of a $6M CFI/ORF project on the construction of a digital media and systems lab. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada.

Following his B.Math. degree from the University of Waterloo and M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Toronto, he was an NSERC Postdoctoral Fellow and Maitre Assistant at the University of Geneva, Switzerland. He was awarded an NSERC University Research Fellowship in 1987 and returned to the University of Toronto to a faculty position. He was Associate Director of the Computer Systems Research Institute,and a Visiting Professor at the University of Grenoble, France. He has been a member of various boards, including the Scientific Advisory Board of GMD, (Bonn, Germany) and of the Max Planck Centre for Visual Computing and Communication (Saarbrucken, Germany); the Board of Directors of TrueSpectra Inc. (Toronto) and of Tucows Inc. (Toronto); the Board of Directors of CITO (Ottawa); the Advisory Boards of CastleHill Ventures, PlateSpin, BitFlash, TrueSpectra (acquired by Adobe), OctigaBay Systems (acquired by Cray Systems), and View22 Technology Inc., and Intel Science and Technology Center for Visual Computing (Santa Clara). and the Executive Advisory Board of the IBM Lab in Toronto. He is currently on the Technical Advisory Board of TandemLaunch Ventures, Datifex, and Arius Technologies.

Eugene has participated in many task forces and reviews of institutes around the world, including three institutes at GMD (Germany), INRIA (France), and iCORE (Calgary). He chaired the review of the Department of Computer Science at UBC (2000), and the Department of Computer Science at ETH, Zurich (2008), and sat on the review panel of the Faculty of Science at UBC (2011), and of Computer Science at EPFL, Lausanne (2015). He has had a long association with the computer graphics and digital media industries internationally. He now works with various companies in an advisory capacity on technological and business issues as well as due diligence.

Eugene's research interests include most aspects of realistic computer graphics, including computer animation, modelling natural phenomena, and illumination, as well as strong interests in biomedical computing and high-performance graphics hardware. He has written two books and (co-)authored over 130 papers on these topics. Seventeen doctoral students and 60 master's students have graduated under his supervision. He has won several awards: two teaching awards; Innovation Awards from ITRC for research in computer graphics, and Burroughs-Wellcome for biomedical research; an NSERC Synergy Award for innovation and industrial collaboration in visual modelling; and the 2014 CHCCS Achievement Award. He was elected Eurographics Fellow in July 2014, and became a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada in September 2014. He was papers chair for SIGGRAPH 2001, past chair of the SIGGRAPH Awards Committee (2003-2008) and the ACM Paris Kanellakis Awards Committee (2011), general co-chair of Symposium for Computer Animation 2008, Pacific Graphics International 2011, and the Eurographics Symposium on Rendering 2016. Whenever his editor is looking over his shoulder, he even writes an illusory book on computational reality, which he might even finish some day.

His industrial interests include technology transfer in the Information Technology area, internet-based media applications, digital media, multimedia systems, web-based services, large-scale computation, and the interaction of information technology and business.

On occasion, he manages to sneak a few hours of sleep.

(Last modified: 2 May 2018)