Invited Speekers of ICAT'2000

Professor Nadia Thalmann

thalmann@cui.unige.ch

Professor Nadia Magnenat-Thalmann has pioneered research into virtual humans over the last 15 years, participating in and demonstrating some of the most spectacular state-of- the-art developments in the field, and is responsible for the rigorous and intensive academic research programs that made them possible.
Professor Nadia Magnenat-Thalmann is President of the International Computer Graphics Society and Chair of the IFIP Working Group 5.10 in Computer Graphics and Virtual Worlds. She is also editor of several journals, among them The Visual Computer and The Visualization and Computer Animation Journal. She has founded in 1988 the Geneva Computer generated Film Festival and has contributed to the creation of the Department of Information System where she has been the Director from 1996 to present time.

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Professor Anselmo Lastra

lastra@cs.unc.edu

Anselmo A. Lastra is a visiting associate professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He will be an associate professor, effective 1 January 2001. Dr. Lastra received a B.S.E.E. from the Georgia Institute of Technology and M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science from Duke University. Prior to joining UNC-Chapel Hill, he was a project manager at Coulter Electronics, leading the development of medical instrumentation. He also served as a consultant at AT&T Bell Laboratories. Currently he is the software manager for the Pixel-Planes/PixelFlow research team at UNC-Chapel Hill. This research group is currently working on designs for image-based rendering. They recently completed PixelFlow, a scaleable graphics computer developed jointly with Hewlett-Packard Corp. At SIGGRAPH 97, PixelFlow was demonstrated rendering over 33 million triangles per second.

Professor Yoichiro Kawaguchi

yoichiro@iii.u-tokyo.ac.jp

Yoichiro Kawaguchi, Professor of University of Tokyo, a computer graphics artist born in1952 in Tanegashima, Kagoshima Prefecture. Graduated in Kyushu Institute of Design and received a master's degree from University of Tokyo Education. Recognized around the world for his computer graphics art, he has received many distinguished awards, including: Tokyo Techno Forum, Gold Medal Award L'OREAL Grand Prix, L'OREAL Art and Science Foundation. "COACERVATER" (CD-ROM and book) was published in 1994 by NTT Publishing. In 1998, "LUMINOUS VISION," a collection of Yoichiro Kawaguchi's Art, was published on video, DVD and laser disk by Odyssey of the U.S.

Professor Makoto Sato

msato@pi.titech.ac.jp

We are developing haptic display that measures user's fingertip position and gives the user force sensation. Using haptic display, the user can directly manipulate computer-generated virtual objects with his fingers and feel shape, texture, collision, weight, inertia, etc. In this system, user can operate virtual objects naturally as in the real world. (figure: haptic display SPIDAR)