Jessica K. Hodgins is an American roboticist and researcher who is a professor at Carnegie Mellon's

Robotics Institute The Robotics Institute (RI) is a division of the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States. A June 2014 article in ''Robotics Business Review'' magazine calls it "the world's best robo ...

and School of Computer Science. Hodgins is currently also Research Director at the Facebook AI Research lab in Pittsburgh next to Carnegie Mellon. She was elected the president of

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 ...

in 2017. Until 2016, she was Vice President of Research at

Disney Research Disney Research is a network of research labs supporting The Walt Disney Company. Its purpose is to pursue scientific and technological innovation to advance the company's broad media and entertainment efforts. It has facilities in Los Angeles, Z ...

and was the Director of the Disney Research labs in Pittsburgh and Los Angeles.

Early life and education

Jessica Hodgins was born in Urbana, Illinois to Audrey and Frank Hodgins. Audrey was an educator whose work was published in numerous journals and magazines. Frank is the namesake of the Frank Hodgins Fellowship Fund for graduate students in English at the University of Illinois. Hodgins attended Urbana High School. She earned a BA in mathematics from

Yale University Yale University is a Private university, private research university in New Haven, Connecticut. Established in 1701 as the Collegiate School, it is the List of Colonial Colleges, third-oldest institution of higher education in the United Sta ...

, and went on to receive her PhD in computer science from Carnegie Mellon University in 1989.

Career

Hodgins was Associate Professor and Assistant Dean in the College of Computing at Georgia Institute of Technology from 1998 to 2000. She has been a professor at Carnegie Mellon University since 2000. She was Editor in Chief of

ACM Transactions on Graphics ''ACM Transactions on Graphics'' (TOG) is a bimonthly peer-reviewed scientific journal that covers the field of computer graphics. It was established in 1982 and is published by the Association for Computing Machinery. TOG publishes two special iss ...

from 2000 to 2002, and she served as Papers Chair for

in 2003. She was elected the president of

in 2017. Prior to being elected president, she served as director at large from 2009 to 2017.

Disney Research

Hodgins joined

in 2008 and founded the Disney Research Pittsburgh lab. Much of her research there has been focused on motion capture and computer animation technologies. In 2012 she was part of a team that developed and demonstrated a technique for

motion-capture acting Motion-capture acting, also called performance-capture acting and often abbreviated as mo-cap or P-cap, is a type of acting in which an actor wears markers or sensors on a skintight bodysuit or directly on the skin. Hugh Hart, January 24, 2012, W ...

to be performed with a single camera and no markers.

Facebook AI Research Lab

Beginning in summer 2018, Hodgins is on partial leave from CMU to build a Facebook AI Research Lab located in Pittsburgh.

Awards

Hodgins has received a NSF Young Investigator Award, a Packard Fellowship, and a

Sloan Fellowship The Sloan Research Fellowships are awarded annually by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation since 1955 to "provide support and recognition to early-career scientists and scholars". This program is one of the oldest of its kind in the United States. ...

. In 2010, she was awarded the

Computer Graphics Achievement Award. In 2017 she was awarded the

Steven A. Coons Award. Hodgins was elected as an

ACM Fellow ACM or A.C.M. may refer to: Aviation * AGM-129 ACM, 1990–2012 USAF cruise missile * Air chief marshal * Air combat manoeuvring or dogfighting * Air cycle machine * Arica Airport (Colombia) (IATA: ACM), in Arica, Amazonas, Colombia Computing * ...

in 2018 for "contributions to character animation, human simulation, and humanoid robotics".

References

External links

CMU Robotics Institute page

CMU School of Computer Science page

Disney Research page
{{DEFAULTSORT:Hodgins, Jessica Carnegie Mellon University faculty Living people Yale University alumni Carnegie Mellon University alumni American roboticists Women roboticists American computer scientists American women computer scientists Sloan Research Fellows Computer graphics researchers Disney Research people Fellows of the Association for Computing Machinery Year of birth missing (living people)