Andrew Paul Witkin (July 22, 1952 – September 12, 2010) was an American
computer scientist who made major contributions in
computer vision and
computer graphics
Computer graphics deals with generating images with the aid of computers. Today, computer graphics is a core technology in digital photography, film, video games, cell phone and computer displays, and many specialized applications. A great de ...
.
Education
Witkin studied
psychology
Psychology is the scientific study of mind and behavior. Psychology includes the study of conscious and unconscious phenomena, including feelings and thoughts. It is an academic discipline of immense scope, crossing the boundaries between ...
at
Columbia College, Columbia University, for his bachelor's degree, and at
MIT
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a private land-grant research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Established in 1861, MIT has played a key role in the development of modern technology and science, and is one of the m ...
for his Ph.D supervised by
Whitman A. Richards.
[
]
Career
After MIT, Witkin worked briefly at SRI International
SRI International (SRI) is an American nonprofit scientific research institute and organization headquartered in Menlo Park, California. The trustees of Stanford University established SRI in 1946 as a center of innovation to support economic ...
on computer vision. He then moved to Schlumberger's Fairchild Laboratory for Artificial Intelligence Research, later Schlumberger Palo Alto Research, where he led research in computer vision and graphics; here he invented scale-space filtering, scale-space segmentation and Active Contour Models and published several prize-winning papers.
From 1988 to 1998 he was a professor of computer science
Computer science is the study of computation, automation, and information. Computer science spans theoretical disciplines (such as algorithms, theory of computation, information theory, and automation) to practical disciplines (includi ...
, robotics
Robotics is an interdisciplinary branch of computer science and engineering. Robotics involves design, construction, operation, and use of robots. The goal of robotics is to design machines that can help and assist humans. Robotics integrate ...
, and art
Art is a diverse range of human activity, and resulting product, that involves creative or imaginative talent expressive of technical proficiency, beauty, emotional power, or conceptual ideas.
There is no generally agreed definition of wha ...
at Carnegie Mellon University, after which he joined Pixar
Pixar Animation Studios (commonly known as Pixar () and stylized as P I X A R) is an American computer animation studio known for its critically and commercially successful computer animated feature films. It is based in Emeryville, Californ ...
in Emeryville, California
Emeryville is a city located in northwest Alameda County, California, in the United States. It lies in a corridor between the cities of Berkeley and Oakland, with a border on the shore of San Francisco Bay. The resident population was 12,905 ...
. At CMU and Pixar, with his colleagues he developed the methods and simulators used to model and render natural-looking cloth,
Awards and honors
The paper "Snakes: Active Contour Models"Marr Prize
The International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV) is a research conference sponsored by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) held every other year. It is considered to be one of the top conferences in computer vision, ...
in 1987. According to CiteSeer
CiteSeerX (formerly called CiteSeer) is a public search engine and digital library for scientific and academic papers, primarily in the fields of computer and information science.
CiteSeer's goal is to improve the dissemination and access of ac ...
, this paper is the 11th most cited paper ever in computer science.[
]
The 1987 paper "Constraints on deformable models: Recovering 3D shape and nonrigid motion" was also a prize winner.[
In 1992, Witkin and Kass were awarded the ]Prix Ars Electronica
The Prix Ars Electronica is one of the best known and longest running yearly prizes in the field of electronic and interactive art, computer animation, digital culture and music. It has been awarded since 1987 by Ars Electronica (Linz, Austria) ...
computer graphics award for "Reaction–Diffusion Texture Buttons."
Witkin received the ACM SIGGRAPH
ACM SIGGRAPH is the international Association for Computing Machinery's Special Interest Group on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques based in New York. It was founded in 1969 by Andy van Dam (its direct predecessor, ACM SICGRAPH was fo ...
Computer Graphics Achievement Award in 2001 "for his pioneering work in bringing a physics based approach to computer graphics."
As senior scientist at Pixar, Witkin received a technical Academy Award
The Academy Awards, better known as the Oscars, are awards for artistic and technical merit for the American and international film industry. The awards are regarded by many as the most prestigious, significant awards in the entertainment ind ...
in 2006 for "pioneering work in physically based computer-generated techniques used to simulate realistic cloth in motion pictures."[
]
Personal life
Andrew Witkin was the son of psychologist Herman A. Witkin and geneticist Evelyn M. Witkin. He was married to psychologist Sharon Witkin; they had two children.
Death
He died in a scuba diving accident off the coast of Monterey, California, on September 12, 2010. The 2011 film, '' Cars 2'' was dedicated in his memory along with Japeth Pieper in the credits.
References
Further reading
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External links
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{{DEFAULTSORT:Witkin, Andrew
1952 births
American computer scientists
2010 deaths
Accidental deaths in California
Columbia College (New York) alumni
Massachusetts Institute of Technology School of Science alumni
20th-century American Jews
Carnegie Mellon University faculty
SRI International people
Academy Award for Technical Achievement winners
21st-century American Jews