Stanford EE Computer Systems Colloquium

4:15PM, Wednesday, Feb 10, 2010
HP Auditorium, Gates Computer Science Building B01
http://ee380.stanford.edu


Stanford Computer Science Department
Distinguished Computer Scientist Lecture



Computational Aesthetics & Adobe's Creative Technologies Lab
Drawing upon Artistic Tradition to Enhance Communication and Adorn Modern Life

David Salesin
Adobe Systems
About the talk:

This is two talks in one:

Computational Aesthetics: Our sense of aesthetics is grounded in the natural world, our place as living things. Yet our intimate connection with nature grows more tenuous every day. Indeed, within the last year the world passed an important milestone: for the first time, half of all people on the planet now live in urban rather than rural environments. In addition, more and more of our intellectual lives are spent in virtual worlds; a recent study, for instance, showed that American children ages 8 to 18 spend an average of 6-1/2 hours a day attending to some form of media, such as TV, videos, computers, and games. In an increasingly manmade, urbanized, and technological virtual world it is imperative that we keep aesthetic things in our experience as a counterbalance to these forces. In this talk, I will give a brief history of aesthetics, argue the need for incorporating aesthetics into our real and virtual environments, and discuss how computer graphics can play an essential role in this pursuit.

Adobe's Creative Technologies Lab: Adobe was established twenty-six years ago with the invention of PostScript, work that redefined how people share documents around the world. Ever since, Adobe has been reinventing the way people engage with ideas and information. As Adobe continues to grow, deepening its technology in documents, graphics, and imaging - and broadening into new areas - where is the necessary innovation going to come from? The best strategy, we believe, is to leverage the vast amount of research already taking place at universities around the world by partnering and collaborating with them. To this end, Adobe has established the Creative Technologies Lab, with offices in San Francisco, Seattle, and Cambridge MA, in close proximity to leading universities. Our researchers, who work in computer graphics, vision, audio, and HCI, not only maintain close collaborations with academic groups around the world but also have the chance to participate in transforming their research into products used by millions. In this talk, I will give an overview of the Creative Technologies Lab and describe some of our most recent research.

Slides:

There is no downloadable version of the slides for this talk available at this time.

About the speaker:

David Salesin leads the Creative Technologies Lab at Adobe Systems, where he is a Fellow, and is also an Affiliate Professor in the Department of Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Washington.

He received his Sc.B. from Brown University in 1983, and his Ph.D. from Stanford University in 1991. From 1983-87, he worked at Lucasfilm and Pixar, where he contributed computer animation for the Academy Award-winning short film, "Tin Toy," and the feature-length film, Young Sherlock Holmes. He spent the 1991-92 year as a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Program of Computer Graphics at Cornell University. In 1996, he co-founded two companies, where he served as Chief Scientist: Inklination and Numinous Technologies. When the latter was acquired by Microsoft in 1999, he worked as a Senior Researcher at Microsoft Research until 2005, while remaining on the UW faculty. Over the years, he has also worked as an intern or consultant at a number of production studios and research labs, including Sogitec Audiovisuel (in Paris), DEC Systems Research Center, DEC Paris Research Lab, Aldus (now part of Adobe), Xerox PARC, and Broderbund.

Salesin has received many awards for his research and teaching, including the Washington Professor of the Year Award in 1998 and the ACM SIGGRAPH Computer Graphics Achievement Award in 2000. He was named an ACM Fellow in 2002. Salesin's research interests are in computer graphics and include digital photography and video, automatic design & presentation of information, non-photorealistic rendering, visualization, image-based rendering, digital typography, and color. His outside interests include Tango, photography, Aikido (in which he holds a black belt), printmaking, piano, saxophone, flying, traveling, cooking, old films, backpacking, skiing, mountain biking, and chocolate.

Contact information:

David Salesin
salesin@adobe.comi