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Andy Witkin

Andy Witkin
Andy Witkin 1987 by Malcolm Slaney.jpg
Andy in 1987
Born Andrew Paul Witkin
(1952-07-22)July 22, 1952
Died September 12, 2010(2010-09-12) (aged 58)
Monterey, CA
Scuba diving accident
Other names Andy Witkin
Nationality American
Institutions
Alma mater
Thesis Shape from Contour (1980)
Doctoral advisor Whitman Albin Richards
Doctoral students
  • Michael Gleicher
  • Sebastian Grassia
  • Zoran Popovic
  • Will Welch
Known for Toy Story 3
Notable awards Prix Ars Electronica (1992)
Website
www.cs.cmu.edu/~aw

Andrew Paul Witkin (July 22, 1952 – September 12, 2010) was an American computer scientist who made major contributions in computer vision and computer graphics.

Witkin studied psychology at Columbia College, Columbia University for his bachelor's degree, and at MIT for his Ph.D supervised by Whitman Albin Richards.

After MIT, Witkin worked briefly at SRI International on computer vision. He then moved to Schlumberger's Fairchild Laboratory for Artificial Intelligence Research, later Schlumberger Palo Alto Research, where he led research in computer vision and graphics; here he invented scale-space filtering, scale-space segmentation and Active Contour Models and published several prize-winning papers.

From 1988 to 1998 he was a professor of computer science, robotics, and art at Carnegie Mellon University, after which he joined Pixar in Emeryville, California. At CMU and Pixar, with his colleagues he developed the methods and simulators used to model and render natural-looking cloth, hair, water, and other complex aspects of modern computer animation.

The paper "Snakes: Active Contour Models" achieved an honorable mention for the Marr Prize in 1987. According to CiteSeer, this paper is the 11th most cited paper ever in computer science. The 1987 paper "Constraints on deformable models: Recovering 3D shape and nonrigid motion" was also a prize winner.


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