Keynote Presentations

The essence of animation is creating the illusion of life, convincing the audience that a character is alive and has its own feelings and thoughts. Is it possible to bring an interactive digital character to “life” who can “think,” “feel,” have experiences, and act with volition? What is it, exactly, to think, to feel, to experience? In this keynote, Dr. Mark Sagar will discuss his team’s biologically based approach, where they are developing a virtual nervous system analogous to our own, combining computational models of sensory, cognitive and emotional processes, language, behavior, and motor systems. These systems activate virtual muscles to animate a virtual face and body, sensing, learning, acting, and reacting in real time. The interoperation of these systems in face-to-face and shared interactions is exemplified in projects like BabyX, a simulated toddler which aims to enhance our comprehension of social learning and behavior — but it can also serve as groundwork for achieving human-like cooperation with future artificial intelligence. Dr. Sagar will elaborate how creating the inner life of a character is strongly linked with the “body,” one of the central thematic focuses of the conference.

NVIDIA Founder and CEO Jensen Huang sits down with Lauren Goode, senior writer at WIRED, to discuss how accelerated computing and generative AI are transforming industries such as manufacturing and creating new opportunities for innovation and growth. The convergence of AI and advanced computing, from AI PCs to AI factories to digital twins, is driving this transformation. It’s the beginning of a new industrial revolution.

Jensen will speak with Lauren about the impact of robotics and AI in industrial digitization, illustrating how industry sectors are adopting autonomous operations and building city-scale digital twins to increase efficiency and reduce costs. Jensen will also answer some questions from the SIGGRAPH community.

Jensen Huang founded NVIDIA in 1993 and has served since its inception as president, chief executive officer, and a member of the board of directors. Huang has been elected to the National Academy of Engineering and is a recipient of the Semiconductor Industry Association’s highest honor, the Robert N. Noyce Award; IEEE Founder’s Medal; the Dr. Morris Chang Exemplary Leadership Award; and honorary doctorate degrees from National Chiao Tung University, National Taiwan University, and Oregon State University. He has been named the world’s best CEO by The Economist and Harvard Business Review, as well as Fortune’s Businessperson of the Year and one of TIME magazine’s 100 most influential people. He holds a BSEE degree from Oregon State University and an MSEE degree from Stanford.

Mark Zuckerberg is the founder and CEO of Meta where he is responsible for setting the overall direction and product strategy for the company. He leads the design of Meta’s services and development of its core technology and infrastructure. Meta is working on building AGI and making it accessible and useful for everyone in the world, including by open sourcing its Llama models. Mark also co-founded the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, which is leveraging AI to learn more about the behavior of our cells.

Dr. Dava Newman’s keynote presentation will cover the theme of “Humanity Becoming Interplanetary: Exploring Space for Earth”. Our amazing Webb Space Telescope discoveries to recent space science missions to Pluto and Jupiter, the discovery of thousands of exoplanets, and orbital missions to monitor Spaceship Earth provide a cosmic perspective. Humanity will become interplanetary and find life elsewhere; however, Mars is not “Plan B”. Spaceship Earth, our pale blue dot, is the most magnificent planet for humanity to thrive. Earth is speaking to us — are we listening? A visual, interactive Earth Mission Control is revealed that will help take actions to regenerate Earth’s oceans, land, and atmosphere subsystems. The “overview effect” from space lets us appreciate Earth’s interconnected systems through supercomputer data visualizations and hyper-local narratives of natural disasters with the goal to accelerate collective actions for a healthier future between humanity and our home planet.

Daniel Cardoso Llach and Theodora Vardouli are the founders of lattice.space, a platform for critical and creative research at the nexus of design and computation, and the co-authors and co-editors of Designing the Computational Image (AR+D 2023), a book visually examining the history of computational methods for representation, simulation, and manufacturing and their contemporary repercussions across creative fields. Their work, both as individual scholars and as collaborators, explores the historical entwining of computing with design and architecture.

Daniel Cardoso Llach, Ph.D., is associate professor of architecture at Carnegie Mellon University, where he chairs the Computational Design program and directs the Computational Design Laboratory (CodeLab). He is the author of numerous publications, exhibitions, and technologies critically examining the interplay of computing and design including the book Builders of the Vision: Software and the Imagination of Design (Routledge 2015). Cardoso has received grants from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, Canada’s Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, the Manufacturing Futures Institute, Google, and Autodesk among others; has held visiting fellowships at the University of Cambridge, U.K., and at Leuphana, Germany; and is a 2024-2025 Humboldt Foundation Research Fellow. He is co-editor, with Terry Knight, of the “Design, Technology, and Society” Routledge book series, was ACM SIGGRAPH 2022 Art Papers Chair, and is papers co-chair for the 2024 ACM SIGCHI Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work & Social Computing (CSCW).

Theodora Vardouli, Ph.D., is associate professor at the Peter Guo-hua Fu School of Architecture, McGill University, where she directs the Computational Design Exploratory (CoDEx). She is the author of awarded articles and chapters on architectural histories of computing and has published three books, including Graph Vision: Digital Architecture’s Skeletons (MIT Press forthcoming 2024) and Computer Architectures: Constructing the Common Ground (co-edited with Olga Touloumi, Routledge 2020). Vardouli is a grantee of the Canada Foundation of Innovation, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, and the Fonds de recherche du Québec among others. Her work has received several recognitions, including the 2022 Best Paper Award by the Association for Computer Aided Design in Architecture (ACADIA) and the 2022 Mahoney Prize (with David Theodore) by the Special Interest Group for Computing Information and Society (SIGCIS). Vardouli serves on the editorial board of Technology, Architecture + Design and is editor of the upcoming issue Coding.