Abstract:

Our sense of aesthetics is grounded in the natural world, our place as living things. Yet our intimate connection with nature grows more tenuous every day. Indeed, in the coming year the world will pass an important milestone: for the first time, half of all people on the planet will live in urban rather than rural environments. In addition, more and more of our intellectual lives are spent in virtual worlds; a recent study, for instance, showed that American children ages 8 to 18 spend an average of 6-1/2 hours a day attending to some form of media, such as TV, videos, computers, and games. In an increasingly manmade,
urbanized, and technological virtual world it is imperative that we keep aesthetic things in our experience as a counterbalance to these forces. In this talk, I will give a brief history of aesthetics, argue the need for incorporating aesthetics into our real and virtual environments, and discuss how computer graphics can play an essential role in this pursuit.

BIOGRAPHY
David Salesin is a Professor in the Department of Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Washington, where he has been on the faculty since 1992, and a Senior Researcher in the Document Processing & Understanding Group at Microsoft Research, where he has also worked since 1999. He received his Sc.B. from Brown University in 1983, and his Ph.D. from Stanford University in 1991. From 1983-87, he worked at Lucasfilm and Pixar, where he contributed computer animation for the Academy Award-winning short film, “Tin Toy,” and the feature-length film Young Sherlock Holmes. During his years at Stanford, he also worked as
an intern at the DEC Systems Research Center and Paris Research Lab. He spent the 1991-92 year as a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Program of Computer Graphics at Cornell University. He has consulted at Sogitec Audiovisuel, Aldus (now part of Adobe), Xerox PARC, Broderbund, and Microsoft Research. In 1996, he co-founded two companies, where he served as Chief Scientist: Inklination and Numinous Technologies (acquired by Microsoft in 1999). Salesin received an NSF Young Investigator award in 1993; an ONR Young Investigator Award, Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship, and an NSF Presidential Faculty Fellow Award in 1995; the University of Washington Award for Outstanding Faculty Achievement in the College of Engineering in 1996; the University of Washington Distinguished Teaching Award in 1997; The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and the Council for the Advancement and
Support of Education Washington Professor of the Year Award in 1998; the ACM SIGGRAPH Computer Graphics Achievement Award in 2000; and he became
an ACM Fellow in 2002.

Date: 2005-May-09     Time: 16:00:00     Room: TagusPark, Anfiteatro A5

For more information:

• jaj@inesc.pt
• 213100271