"We're thrilled to have these notable Sponsored Keynote Speakers at SIGGRAPH 2023," said Erik Brunvand, SIGGRAPH 2023 Conference Chair. "The SIGGRAPH community thrives on creativity, technology, and innovation, and this lineup of presenters has firsthand experience in being a part of the development, from inception to final product. Having Jensen Huang, Hiroaki Kitano, Natalya Tatarchuk, Allan Poore, Joe Letteri, and Yachen Song talk about their experiences, what's next, and how the SIGGRAPH community can grow and continue to move forward is a pleasure. To have them share their experiences with us is a distinction that only SIGGRAPH can provide."
Assisted Artistry Unleashed: Powering the Future of Film and Real-time 3D With Unity Wētā Tools
Sponsored by Unity Technologies
Speakers: Natalya Tatarchuk, Unity Technologies; Allan Poore, Unity Technologies; and Joe Letteri, Wētā FX
Monday, 7 August 2023
2–3 pm, PDT
In this session, Unity Wētā Tools will present its groundbreaking work in character creation, environment building, rendering, and compositing with the public release of tools once exclusive to top-tier VFX houses. Allan Poore, Natalya Tatarchuk, and Joe Letteri will take the audience inside this technology and show how it's being used in award-winning films to accelerate creative workflows, implement creative changes more easily, and produce higher-quality final shots.
Bio:
Natalya Tatarchuk is a graphics engineer and a rendering enthusiast at heart, currently focusing on driving the state-of-the-art rendering technology, graphics performance, and character content creation in her role as a Distinguished Technical Fellow and Chief Architect, VP, Wētā Tools at Unity. Prior to that, she led the graphics team at Unity, as VP of Graphics for the Unity Editor and Engine. Before that she was a AAA games developer, working on innovative cross-platform rendering engine and game graphics for Bungie's Destiny franchise, as well the Halo series, such as "Halo: ODST" and "Halo: Reach," and AMD Graphics Products Group where she pushed parallel computing boundaries investigating advanced real-time graphics techniques, and graphics hardware design and APIs. Natalya has been encouraging sharing in the games graphics community for several decades, largely by organizing a popular series of courses such as
Advances in Real-time Rendering,
Open Problems in Real-Time Rendering, and
Rendering Engine Architecture at SIGGRAPH conferences.
Bio:
Allan Poore has over 25 years of leadership experience building products and services for the media and entertainment space. In this time, he has brought more than a dozen innovative products to help artists and developers achieve their artistic vision. He has held leadership roles at Pixar, Autodesk, Microsoft, and Amazon. Allan is Senior Vice President of Wētā Tools. In his last role, he led Product and Program on Xbox Cloud Gaming and successfully launched Xbox's first game streaming service. Prior to that, Allan was the VP of RenderMan products at Pixar Animation Studios.
Bio:
Joe Letteri's pioneering work as Senior Visual Effects Supervisor, WētāFX, has earned him five Academy® Awards for Best Visual Effects — most recently for "Avatar: The Way of Water" following earlier wins for "Avatar," "The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers," "The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King," and "King Kong." He has a long-standing interest in creating compelling, realistic creatures and characters — from the Na'vi to Gollum, Alita, and Caesar. Joe has developed many techniques that have become industry standards for creating photorealistic digital effects. This includes co-developing the subsurface scattering technique that brought Gollum to life (winning an Academy® Technical Achievement Award) and pushing the development of large-scale virtual production. Under Joe's leadership, Wētā FX has continued to expand and improve these techniques through films like "The Hobbit" and "The Planet of the Apes" trilogies. Joe is currently working on the upcoming "Avatar" sequels and continues to drive the advancement of Wētā's technological and artistic innovations.
NVIDIA Keynote at SIGGRAPH 2023
Sponsored by NVIDIA
Speaker: Jensen Huang, NVIDIA
Tuesday, 8 August 2023
8–9 am PDT
NVIDIA Founder and CEO Jensen Huang will present at SIGGRAPH 2023 a powerful keynote address that will offer an exclusive look at some of the company's newest technologies, including award-winning research, Universal Scene Description (OpenUSD) developments, and AI-powered solutions for content creation.
Bio:
Jensen Huang founded NVIDIA in 1993 and has served since its inception as president, chief executive officer, and a member of the board of directors. Huang is a recipient of the Semiconductor Industry Association's highest honor, the Robert N. Noyce Award; IEEE Founder's Medal; the Dr. Morris Chang Exemplary Leadership Award; and honorary doctorate degrees from Taiwan's National Chiao Tung University, National Taiwan University, and Oregon State University. He has been named the world's best CEO by Harvard Business Review and Brand Finance, as well as Fortune's Businessperson of the Year and one of TIME magazine's 100 most influential people. Prior to founding NVIDIA, Huang worked at LSI Logic and Advanced Micro Devices. He holds a BSEE degree from Oregon State University and an MSEE degree from Stanford University.
Pioneering the Future of Creation — Join Hiroaki Kitano on How Technology Impacts Creation
Sponsored by Sony
Speaker: Hiroaki Kitano, Sony
Wednesday, 9 August 2023
9:30–10:30 am PDT
Technology and creativity are overlapping forces that push and inspire each other. When they intertwine, they create powerful new forms of expression. Hiroaki Kitano, chief technology officer of Sony Group Corporation, has spent his career at the intersection of technology and creativity, transcending boundaries to create new possibilities. In his keynote, Kitano will invite a range of creators leading the entertainment space across the Sony Group to tell the story of how they employed creativity and technology to realize their creative visions for the world.
Bio:
Hiroaki Kitano is Senior Executive Vice President and Chief Technology Officer of Sony Group Corporation, overseeing the R&D ecosystem across Sony's diverse business, including electronics, semiconductors, and entertainment. Additionally, he is CEO of Sony Research Inc. and Sony Computer Science Laboratories, Inc. (Sony CSL). His work at Carnegie Mellon University to build large-scale, data-driven AI systems on massively parallel computers led to The Computers and Thought Award from the International Joint Conferences on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI) in 1993. The quest continued at Sony CSL and at California Institute of Technology gave rise to the field of systems biology, merging biology and systems science. Kitano is the founding president of the RoboCup Federation, president of IJCAI (2009-2011), and a member of scientific advisory boards for numerous academic institutions, including the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL), and a professor at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology Graduate School. He is a recipient of the Nature Award for Creative Mentoring in Science in 2009 and a fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence. Kitano was an invited artist for La Biennale di Venezia (2000) and for Workspheres exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art — New York (2001).
