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Lance Williams

4:00 PM
February 18, 2009
Ford ITW Auditorium

Dr. Lance Williams, Principal Researcher at Nokia Research Center Hollywood
"The Humanoid Touch"
Abstract: Our new world of digital media offers us the prospect of recording and understanding the details of human performance. Instead of simply recording the sound of a violin, we can imagine recording the performance of the violinist, capturing every movement, breath, and gesture. The nuanced particulars of musicians and actors, athletes and surgeons, dancers and painters, will one day be studied and preserved. We will remember not merely what they did, but exactly how they did it, and this will have enormous consequences for human culture and civilization.

On the way to this bright and promising future, we have lots to learn about form, motion, coordination and timing. This talk will describe the "human face project" undertaken at Walt Disney Studios some years ago, which was aimed at capturing the form and appearance of human faces in motion. The face is a complex and challenging subject. It mediates spoken and unspoken communication, and is (among other things) a highly evolved instrument of deception. We are very familiar with human faces, and pay them great attention. We are critical of their appearance in countless unconscious ways, ways that we may be unaware of, and cannot easily express.

For all these reasons, our work was fraught with difficulties, visible and invisible. This talk will be a personal exploration of these challenges, in words, images, and animation: the elusive illusion of life.

BIO: Lance J. Williams is a prominent graphics researcher who made major contributions to texture map prefiltering, shadow rendering algorithms, facial animation, and antialiasing techniques. Williams was one of the first people to recognize the potential of computer graphics to transform film and video making.

Williams holds a double major in English and Asian Studies from the University of Kansas and a doctorate in Computer Science from the University of Utah. In 1974 he joined the New York Institute of Technology (NYIT). After NYIT he joined the Advanced Technology Group at Apple in 1987. In 1997, Williams joined Dreamworks SKG. In 2002 he became Chief Scientist at Walt Disney Feature Animation Studios. In 2006, Williams joined Google and worked with the Google Earth team. He is currently a Principal Member of Research Staff at Nokia. Williams has won the ACM SIGGRAPH Coons Award for Outstanding Creative Contributions to computer graphics. In 2002, he was awarded a 2001 Technical Achievement Award by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for "his pioneering influence in the field of computer-generated animation and effects for motion pictures."
Northwestern University Robert R. McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department