Member Profile: Kenny Mitchell
1. What do you do, and how long have you been doing it?
I’m a visually motivated real-time graphics R&D leader starting commercially way back as a teenager in the 1980s mostly helping on games for Electronic Arts, Roblox and theme park attractions and movies for Disney. Recently, I’ve returned for my 12th year at Disney as a production technology senior engineer with Walt Disney Animation Studios in Burbank. I’m fortunate to also maintain part-time roles as professor at Edinburgh Napier University recently receiving an exceptional award for a European pathfinder project, along with fractional CTO roles for a couple of small companies in Scotland regularly tele-commuting across thousands of miles.
2. What was your first job?
My first job after finishing my PhD in 1997 was for a startup in Scotland called Vis Interactive, where I shipped technology for the video game engine of a Hasbro Interactive title called Hedz including animated hybrid voxel /polygon character rendering and a Playstation 1 optimized NURBS renderer for a Buffy the Vampire Slayer pitch demo.
3. Where did you complete your formal education?
I gained a BSc honors degree at Edinburgh University, somehow prophetically a joint major of Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence back in 1992. I completed a MSc with distinction and doctorate on real-time 3D information visualization at Edinburgh Napier University, where today I’m a part-time full professor of video game technology since 2012.
4. How did you first get involved with ACM SIGGRAPH?
In the Edinburgh University computer science library I read and cited paper ACM SIGGRAPH articles for my final year undergrad ray-tracing project report in 1991, attending in Orlando for the first time in 1998. I’ve been honored to volunteer for SIGGRAPH in variety of ways since then, including reviewing, sitting on juries, the video game steering group and most recently serving an extended term on the conference advisory group as a video games external representative.
5. What is your favorite memory of a SIGGRAPH conference?
I have a picture standing in front of the full-size X-Wing Fighter in the Los Angeles convention centre south hall in 2005, the force was truly with SIGGRAPH that year and could only be surpassed in a future year with a Millennium Falcon.
6. Describe a project that you would like to share with the ACM SIGGRAPH community.
Our recently completed European pathfinder project on social interaction online with AI through low-latency synchronous avatars able to dance together and have fun was really rewarding including the BoF and Frontiers sessions we were honored to participate in and the outstanding European Commission’s review outcomes of that project. I’m most excited right now to share the next wonderful thing I’m leading for Disney Animation and the next Edinburgh Napier University project which aims to deliver even more health and social benefits to everyone.
7. If you could have dinner with one living or non-living person, who would it be and why?
Having always worked at the fine point of real-time computer graphics, I’m in awe of the achievements of Jensen Huang, I think a dinner with him would be amazing and feels like it could happen with my fingers crossed and a lot of luck.
8. What is something most people don’t know about you?
I played the Tuba in brass band for many years growing up, motivated by my high school music teacher to set the rhythm and tone for the band to follow, and build stamina for the otherwise perhaps not so glamorous, heavy instrument.
9. From which single individual have you learned the most in your life? What did they teach you?
Everyone deserves a great start in life, and I feel unfairly advantaged to have benefited from my mother Rena Mitchell as headteacher of a tiny one classroom school in a poor rural hamlet in Scotland, who enabled me to shoot ahead at my own pace in maths and science with a grounding in critical common sense.
10. Is there someone in particular who has influenced your decision to work with ACM SIGGRAPH?
I really fail to pick one person, but I must shout out in particular to Mikki Rose, Mashhuda Glencross and MK Haley for playing their part in making the ACM SIGGRAPH village an encouraging, exciting and friendly place to be part of.
11. What can you point to in your career as your proudest moment?
Every new achievement of my collaborators is a new proudest moment, for example, Yemi, my latest PhD student having just passed his viva thesis defense today fills me with a new best ever pride.