Thomas Douglas Selkirk Duff (born December 8, 1952) is a

computer programmer A computer programmer, sometimes referred to as a software developer, a software engineer, a programmer or a coder, is a person who creates computer programs — often for larger computer software. A programmer is someone who writes/creates ...

Early life

Duff was born in

Toronto Toronto ( ; or ) is the capital city of the Canadian province of Ontario. With a recorded population of 2,794,356 in 2021, it is the most populous city in Canada and the fourth most populous city in North America. The city is the ancho ...

Ontario Ontario ( ; ) is one of the thirteen provinces and territories of Canada.Ontario is located in the geographic eastern half of Canada, but it has historically and politically been considered to be part of Central Canada. Located in Central Ca ...

, Canada, and was named for his putative ancestor, the fifth Earl of Selkirk. He grew up in Toronto and

Leaside Leaside (/'liːˌsaɪd/) is a neighbourhood in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. It is located northeast of Downtown Toronto, in the vicinity of Eglinton Avenue East and Bayview Avenue. The area takes its name from William Lea and the Lea family, who se ...

. In 1974 he graduated from the

University of Waterloo The University of Waterloo (UWaterloo, UW, or Waterloo) is a public research university with a main campus in Waterloo, Ontario Waterloo is a city in the Canadian province of Ontario. It is one of three cities in the Regional Municipality ...

with a B.Math and, two years later, was awarded an M.Sc. from the

University of Toronto The University of Toronto (UToronto or U of T) is a public research university in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, located on the grounds that surround Queen's Park. It was founded by royal charter in 1827 as King's College, the first institution ...

Career

Duff worked at the

New York Institute of Technology The New York Institute of Technology (NYIT or New York Tech) is a private research university founded in 1955. It has two main campuses in New York—one in Old Westbury, on Long Island, and one in Manhattan. Additionally, it has a cybersecu ...

Computer Graphics Lab and the

Mark Williams Company The Mark Williams Company was a small software company in Chicago, Illinois (later moved to Northbrook, Illinois) that created Coherent, one of the first Unix-like operating systems for IBM PCs and several C programming language compilers. It was ...

Chicago (''City in a Garden''); I Will , image_map = , map_caption = Interactive Map of Chicago , coordinates = , coordinates_footnotes = , subdivision_type = Country , subdivision_name ...

before moving to

Lucasfilm Lucasfilm Ltd. LLC is an American film and television production company and a subsidiary of Walt Disney Studios, which is a business segment of The Walt Disney Company. The studio is best known for creating and producing the ''Star Wars'' and ' ...

's Computer Research and Development Division. He and Thomas Porter, another Lucasfilm employee, developed a new approach to compositing images; their 1984 paper, "Compositing Digital Images", is " e seminal work on an algebra for image compositing", according to

Keith Packard Keith Packard (born April 16, 1963) is a software developer, best known for his work on the X Window System. Packard is responsible for many X extensions and technical papers on X. He has been heavily involved in the development of X since the l ...

. and " Porter-Duff compositing" is now a key technique in computer graphics. (See, for example,

XRender The X Rendering Extension (Render or XRender) is an extension to the X11 core protocol to implement image compositing in the X server, to allow an efficient display of transparent images. History It was written by Keith Packard in 2000 an ...

and Glitz.) Duff later worked for 12 years at

Bell Labs Nokia Bell Labs, originally named Bell Telephone Laboratories (1925–1984), then AT&T Bell Laboratories (1984–1996) and Bell Labs Innovations (1996–2007), is an American industrial research and scientific development company owned by mult ...

Computing Science Research Center, where he worked on computer graphics, wireless networking, and Plan 9; in the course of his work there, he authored the well known " rc"

shell Shell may refer to: Architecture and design * Shell (structure), a thin structure ** Concrete shell, a thin shell of concrete, usually with no interior columns or exterior buttresses ** Thin-shell structure Science Biology * Seashell, a hard ou ...

for the Version 10 Unix operating system. Duff worked at

Pixar Animation Studios 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, Californi ...

from 1996 until his retirement in 2021.

Achievements

* In 1995, he was awarded (with others) the Academy Scientific and Engineering Award for his work on digital image compositing. With

Bill Reeves William Reeves (22 June 1875 – 22 March 1944) was an English cricketer, who at the conclusion of his playing career became an umpire, officiating in five Test Matches. According to Dudley Carew he was "the Sam Weller of umpires, quick of re ...

he designed the first version of

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, Californi ...

Marionette A marionette (; french: marionnette, ) is a puppet controlled from above using wires or strings depending on regional variations. A marionette's puppeteer is called a marionettist. Marionettes are operated with the puppeteer hidden or reveale ...

3-D animation system, which won the same award in 1997. * While working at Lucasfilm, he created

Duff's device In the C programming language, Duff's device is a way of manually implementing loop unrolling by interleaving two syntactic constructs of C: the - loop and a switch statement. Its discovery is credited to Tom Duff in November 1983, when Duff was w ...

, a

loop unrolling Loop unrolling, also known as loop unwinding, is a loop transformation technique that attempts to optimize a program's execution speed at the expense of its binary size, which is an approach known as space–time tradeoff. The transformation ca ...

mechanism in C. * On August 22, 2006, the

United States Patent and Trademark Office The United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) is an agency in the U.S. Department of Commerce that serves as the national patent office and trademark registration authority for the United States. The USPTO's headquarters are in Alexa ...

issued to

for a "Shot shading method and apparatus" invented by Tom Duff and

Robert L. Cook Robert L. Cook (December 10, 1952) is a computer graphics researcher and developer, and the co-creator of the RenderMan rendering software. His contributions are considered to be highly influential in the field of animated arts. In 2009, Cook ...

. *On October 31, 2006, the

issued to

for a "Shot rendering method and apparatus" invented by Tom Duff and

. * In 2015 he became the 21st awardee of the J.W. Graham Medal, named in honor of

Wes Graham James Wesley Graham, OC was a Canadian professor of computer science at the University of Waterloo. Graham was born on January 17, 1932, in Copper Cliff, Ontario. His interest in computing developed while studying math and physics at the U ...

an early influential Professor of Computer Science at the University of Waterloo, and annually awarded to an influential alumnus of the University's Faculty of Mathematics.

Appearances

* Tom Duff makes a

cameo appearance A cameo role, also called a cameo appearance and often shortened to just cameo (), is a brief appearance of a well-known person in a work of the performing arts. These roles are generally small, many of them non-speaking ones, and are commonly eit ...

in the Niven/ Pournelle science fiction novel ''

Footfall ''Footfall'' is a 1985 science fiction novel by American writers Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle. The book depicts the arrival of members of an alien species called the Fithp that have traveled to the Solar System from Alpha Centauri in a large ...

'' as a co-discoverer of the invading spaceship: "Chap named Tom Duff, a computer type, spotted it." * Tom Duff appears briefly in the documentary film "Noisy People" (dir

Tim Perkis Tim Perkis is an experimental musician and writer who works with live electronic and computer sound. Discography "Boundary Layer" 2008 The Hub with John Bischoff, Chris Brown, Tim Perkis, Scot Gresham-Lancaster, Phil Stone. Tzadik Records (N ...

, 2006) playing the banjo.

References

AT&T AT&T Inc. is an American multinational telecommunications holding company headquartered at Whitacre Tower in Downtown Dallas, Texas. It is the world's largest telecommunications company by revenue and the third largest provider of mobile tel ...

11273-880728-02TMS, August 1987 {{DEFAULTSORT:Duff, Tom 1952 births Living people Computer graphics professionals University of Waterloo alumni Unix people Pixar people Plan 9 people Scientists at Bell Labs People from Toronto J.W. Graham Medal awardees New York Institute of Technology faculty Lucasfilm people

Early life

Career

Achievements

Appearances

See also

References

External links