Ken Perlin

Last updated
Ken Perlin
Ken Perlin.jpg
Ken Perlin in 2007
Alma mater Harvard University
New York University
Scientific career
Thesis Synthesizing Realistic Textures by the Composition of Perceptually Motivated Functions  (1986)
Doctoral advisor David G. Lowe
Website cs.nyu.edu/~perlin/

Kenneth H. Perlin is a professor in the Department of Computer Science at New York University, founding director of the Media Research Lab at NYU, director of the Future Reality Lab at NYU, and the Director of the Games for Learning Institute. [1] He holds a BA. degree in Theoretical Mathematics from Harvard University (7/1979), a MS degree in Computer Science from the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, New York University (6/1984), and a PhD degree in Computer Science from the same institution (2/1986). [1] His research interests include graphics, animation, multimedia, [2] and science education. [3] He developed or was involved with the development of techniques such as Perlin noise, [4] real-time interactive character animation, [5] and computer-user interfaces. He is best known for the development of Perlin noise and Simplex noise, both of which are algorithms for realistic-looking Gradient noise.

Contents

He is a collaborator of the World Building Institute. [6]

Awards

In 1996, K. Perlin received an Academy Award for Technical Achievement from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, for the development of Perlin noise. [7] He had introduced this technique with the goal to produce natural-appearing textures on computer-generated surfaces for motion picture visual effects, while working on the Walt Disney Productions' 1982 feature film TRON for which he had developed a large part of the software. [1]

See also

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Perlin noise</span> Type of gradient noise in computer graphics

Perlin noise is a type of gradient noise developed by Ken Perlin in 1983. It has many uses, including but not limited to: procedurally generating terrain, applying pseudo-random changes to a variable, and assisting in the creation of image textures. It is most commonly implemented in two, three, or four dimensions, but can be defined for any number of dimensions.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences</span> Division of New York University, US (founded 1935)

The Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences is the mathematics research school of New York University (NYU). Founded in 1935, it is named after Richard Courant, one of the founders of the Courant Institute and also a mathematics professor at New York University from 1936 to 1972, and serves as a center for research and advanced training in computer science and mathematics. It is located on Gould Plaza next to the Stern School of Business and the economics department of the College of Arts and Science.

Mathematical Applications Group, Inc. was an early computer technology company founded in 1966 by Dr. Philip Mittelman and located in Elmsford, New York, where it was evaluating nuclear radiation exposure. By modeling structures using combinatorial geometry mathematics and applying monte carlo radiation ray tracing techniques, the mathematicians could estimate exposures at various distances and relative locations in and around fictional structures. In 1972, the graphics group called MAGi/SynthaVision was formed at MAGi by Robert Goldstein.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ken Knowlton</span> American computer graphics pioneer (1931–2022)

Kenneth Charles Knowlton was an American computer graphics pioneer, artist, mosaicist and portraitist. In 1963, while working at Bell Labs, he developed the BEFLIX programming language for creating bitmap computer-produced movies. In 1966, also at Bell Labs, he and Leon Harmon created the computer artwork Computer Nude .

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Zoubin Ghahramani</span> British-Iranian machine learning researcher

Zoubin Ghahramani FRS is a British-Iranian researcher and Professor of Information Engineering at the University of Cambridge. He holds joint appointments at University College London and the Alan Turing Institute. and has been a Fellow of St John's College, Cambridge since 2009. He was Associate Research Professor at Carnegie Mellon University School of Computer Science from 2003–2012. He was also the Chief Scientist of Uber from 2016 until 2020. He joined Google Brain in 2020 as senior research director. He is also Deputy Director of the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence.

Douglas Taylor "Doug" Ross was an American computer scientist pioneer, and chairman of SofTech, Inc. He is most famous for originating the term CAD for computer-aided design, and is considered to be the father of Automatically Programmed Tools (APT), a programming language to drive numerical control in manufacturing. His later work focused on a pseudophilosophy he developed and named Plex.

Gregory Peter Panos is an American writer, futurist, educator, strategic planning consultant, conference / event producer, and technology evangelist in augmented reality, virtual reality, human simulation, motion capture, performance animation, 3D character animation, human-computer interaction, and user experience design.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Computer graphics (computer science)</span> Sub-field of computer science

Computer graphics is a sub-field of computer science which studies methods for digitally synthesizing and manipulating visual content. Although the term often refers to the study of three-dimensional computer graphics, it also encompasses two-dimensional graphics and image processing.

Gradient noise is a type of noise commonly used as a procedural texture primitive in computer graphics. It is conceptually different from, and often confused with, value noise. This method consists of a creation of a lattice of random gradients, dot products of which are then interpolated to obtain values in between the lattices. An artifact of some implementations of this noise is that the returned value at the lattice points is 0. Unlike the value noise, gradient noise has more energy in the high frequencies.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Yann LeCun</span> French computer scientist (born 1960)

Yann André LeCun is a Turing Award winning French-American computer scientist working primarily in the fields of machine learning, computer vision, mobile robotics and computational neuroscience. He is the Silver Professor of the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences at New York University and Vice-President, Chief AI Scientist at Meta.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Worley noise</span> Type of noise in computer graphics

Worley noise, also called Voronoi noise and cellular noise, is a noise function introduced by Steven Worley in 1996. Worley noise is an extension of the Voronoi diagram that outputs a real value at a given coordinate that corresponds to the Distance of the nth nearest seed, usually nearest seed, and the seeds are distributed evenly through the region. Worley noise is used to create procedural textures.

The history of computer animation began as early as the 1940s and 1950s, when people began to experiment with computer graphics – most notably by John Whitney. It was only by the early 1960s when digital computers had become widely established, that new avenues for innovative computer graphics blossomed. Initially, uses were mainly for scientific, engineering and other research purposes, but artistic experimentation began to make its appearance by the mid-1960s – most notably by Dr. Thomas Calvert. By the mid-1970s, many such efforts were beginning to enter into public media. Much computer graphics at this time involved 2-D imagery, though increasingly as computer power improved, efforts to achieve 3-D realism became the emphasis. By the late 1980s, photo-realistic 3-D was beginning to appear in film movies, and by mid-1990s had developed to the point where 3-D animation could be used for entire feature film production.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Procedural texture</span> Computer graphics textures that are generated procedurally

In computer graphics, a procedural texture is a texture created using a mathematical description rather than directly stored data. The advantage of this approach is low storage cost, unlimited texture resolution and easy texture mapping. These kinds of textures are often used to model surface or volumetric representations of natural elements such as wood, marble, granite, metal, stone, and others.

John Matthew Hollerbach is a professor of computer science and research professor of mechanical engineering at the University of Utah. He is the editor of The International Journal of Robotics Research, a Senior Editor of Presence: Teleoperators & Virtual Environments, and a Governing Board member of the electronic journal Haptics-e.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Daniel Thalmann</span> Swiss and Canadian computer scientist

Prof. Daniel Thalmann is a Swiss and Canadian computer scientist and a pioneer in Virtual humans. He is currently Honorary Professor at EPFL, Switzerland and Director of Research Development at MIRALab Sarl in Geneva, Switzerland.

Claudio Silva is a Brazilian American computer scientist and data scientist. He is a professor of computer science and engineering at the New York University Tandon School of Engineering, the head of disciplines at the NYU Center for Urban Science and Progress (CUSP) and affiliate faculty member at NYU's Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences. He co-developed the open-source data-exploration system VisTrails with his wife Juliana Freire and many other collaborators. He is a former chair of the executive committee for the IEEE Computer Society Technical Committee on Visualization and Graphics.

Jessica K. Hodgins is an American roboticist and researcher who is a professor at Carnegie Mellon's Robotics Institute 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 in 2017. Until 2016, she was Vice President of Research at Disney Research and was the Director of the Disney Research labs in Pittsburgh and Los Angeles.

Steven Mark Drucker is an American computer scientist who studies how to help people understand data, and communicate their insights to others. He is a Partner at Microsoft Research, where he also serves as the Research Manager of the VIDA group. Drucker is an affiliate professor at the University of Washington Computer Science and Engineering Department.

Jiaya Jia is a tenured professor of the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK). He is an IEEE Fellow, the associate editor-in-chief of one of IEEE’s flagship and premier journals- Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (TPAMI), as well as on the editorial board of International Journal of Computer Vision (IJCV).

Jane Patricia Wilhelms was an American biologist and computer scientist known for her contributions to computer graphics, including work on anatomical simulation of humans and animals and collision detection in computer animation, and isosurfaces and volume rendering in scientific visualization. She was a professor of computer science at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

References

  1. 1 2 3 "Professor Kenneth Perlin Vitae".
  2. Reality Lab Lecture: Ken Perlin - How to Build a Holodeck , retrieved 2023-02-22
  3. Plass, J. L. et al., "The impact of individual, competitive, and collaborative mathematics game play on learning, performance, and motivation", Journal of Educational Psychology 105, 1050-1066 (2013), DOI: 10.1037/a0032688, http://mindsets-and-motivation-lab.commons.yale-nus.edu.sg/wp-content/uploads/sites/39/2014/08/Plass-OKeefe-et-al-2013.pdf "
  4. Perlin, Ken (2002-07-01). "Improving noise". ACM Transactions on Graphics. 21 (3): 681–682. doi:10.1145/566654.566636. ISSN   0730-0301.
  5. Perlin, K. "Real time responsive animation with personality". IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics. 1 (1): 5–15. doi:10.1109/2945.468392. ISSN   1941-0506.
  6. "Ken Perlin | World Building Institute".
  7. Brozan, Nadine (1997-03-13). "CHRONICLE". The New York Times. ISSN   0362-4331 . Retrieved 2023-02-22.