ACM TechNews

Disney Launches Global Research & Development Labs With Carnegie Mellon and Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich

Carnegie Mellon News (08/11/08) Spice, Byron

Disney, Carnegie Mellon University, and the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich (ETH Zurich) will work together on a research and development initiative that will establish collaborative labs in Pittsburgh and Zurich. "Creating the next generation of sophisticated technologies requires long-term vision and collaboration with world-class innovators," said Disney and Pixar Animation Studios president's Ed Catmull at ACM SIGGRAPH. The labs will conduct research and development on computer animation, computational cinematography, autonomous interactive characters, robotics, data mining, user interfaces, and other initiatives. Each lab represents a five-year commitment from Disney to fund a director and seven to eight principal investigators. "The access Disney provides to real-world problems and data will enable us to do research with greater impact than is typically possible within a purely academic environment," says Jessica Hodgins, a professor of professor of computer science and robotics and director of Disney Research, Pittsburgh. Hodgins expects projects to include research into autonomous animated characters, databases, machine learning, and visualization. Markus Gross, head of ETH Zurich's Computer Graphics Laboratory, says the collaboration with Disney is on the "cusp of the cutting edge," and that the partnership will create synergies that will open up a variety of different fields in entertainment technology. "Our research will explore novel algorithms to bring both traditional animation and 3D computer animation to the next level of perfection," Gross says.

http://www.cmu.edu/news/archive/2008/August/aug11_disneylab.shtml

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