Biography

Michael Kass is an American computer scientist best known for his work in computer graphics and computer vision. He has won an Academy Award and the SIGGRAPH Computer Graphics Achievement Award and is an ACM Fellow.

Kass, David Baraff and Andrew Witkin shared an Academy Award for Scientific and Technical Achievement in 2005 for clothing animation, including his pioneering work on the clothing simulator used by Pixar in the short Geri's Game, Best Animated Short Film, Academy Awards 1997. He contributed a variety of technologies to Pixar animated films, from A Bug's Life through Monsters University.In 2009, Kass was honored by ACM SIGGRAPH for "his extensive and significant contributions to computer graphics, ranging from image processing to animation to modeling, and in particular for his introduction of optimization techniques as a fundamental tool in graphics." The award citation notes: "Michael is a graphics renaissance man: he's worked on animation, modeling, textures, image processing and even on graphics systems. In each area, he's made groundbreaking contributions."Google Scholar counts over 30K citations to his work, including one of the top 20 most cited papers in computer science, “Snakes: Active Contour Models," authored with Andrew Witkin and Demetri Terzopoulos. The "Snakes" paper launched the Active contour model, a framework for delineating an object outline from a possibly noisy 2D image for applications like object tracking, shape recognition, segmentation, edge detection and stereo matching.

Kass developed the Hierarchical Z-Buffer with collaborators Ned Greene and Gavin Miller, a rendering technique that enables great increases in practical scene complexity compared to traditional Z-buffering. The algorithm can be found in all modern graphics processing units (GPU).Currently a distinguished engineer at NVIDIA, Kass is involved in a variety of projects related to augmented reality, virtual reality, and various types of content creation. Prior to NVIDIA, he was a senior principal engineer at Intel, a distinguished fellow at Magic Leap, a senior research scientist at Pixar, and a principal engineer at Apple Computers. His early days in advanced technologies began at Schlumberger Artificial Intelligence Research Laboratory after earning his Ph.D. from Stanford.Kass has 28 issued U.S. patents and was honored in 2018 by the New York Intellectual Property Law Association as Inventor of the Year.

Kass is also a champion juggler, Argentine tango dancer, and an accomplished ice dancer.