Perry Kivolowitz

Perry Kivolowitz (born 1961) is an American computer scientist and business person. In 1985, he co-founded Advanced Systems Design Group which built hardware for the Commodore Amiga. This company was renamed Elastic Reality, Inc. and became well known as a digital imaging software provider. In 1995 this company sold to Avid Technology, Inc.

In 1996 he received an Academy Award for Scientific and Technical Achievement for the invention of shape-driven warping and morphing as exemplified in the Avid Elastic Reality package once in widespread use. Dr. Garth Dickie was a co-recipient of this award. The invention is noteworthy in that it provided a means of creating warping and morphing effects using an interface which was more optimized for the user rather than the computation. The award reads:

"These components form the core of an efficient and easy-to-use system that greatly simplifies the creation of shape-changing visual effects in motion pictures."

Perry is a principal in SilhouetteFX LLC. He co-founded Profound Effects, Inc. (2001–2008), Hypercosm Inc. (1999–2001) and KSK Electrics, LLC (2013–present). Perry was accepted into the Visual Effects Society in 2012.

From 1997 to 1999 and from 2006 to 2015, Perry was a member of the Computer Sciences Department of the University of Wisconsin–Madison, first as an adjunct faculty member and then as a Faculty Associate and Instructional Program Director. During the University of Wisconsin - Madison's Sesquicentennial Celebration, Mr. Kivolowitz was honored as being one of the 150 Ways the University of Wisconsin has Touched the World.

Perry lectured for AT&T and Bell Labs in the early 1980s on Unix Internals and debugging primarily at an AT&T facility in Piscataway New Jersey but also across the country. In April 2012, Perry resumed lecturing on the process of debugging

As a graduate student Kivolowitz authored one of the earliest key logger programs, the source code of which was posted to Usenet in November 1983. Mr. Kivolowitz authored an early paper on file systems for write-once media presented at the 1984 USENIX conference in Salt Lake City.

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