Register now to access computer graphics excellence.
Welcome to SIGGRAPH 2024
Keynote Presentations
From the Microscopic to the Body, Built Environment, City, World, Cosmos, and even unmeasurable concepts like Imagination, the esteemed SIGGRAPH 2024 Keynote Speakers share their perspectives for building our most desirable technological future on all scales and advancing computer graphics and interactive techniques into the next half century.
AI and The Next Computing Platforms With Jensen Huang and Mark Zuckerberg
WORLDJensen Huang and Mark Zuckerberg
NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang and Meta founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg will discuss how fundamental research is enabling AI breakthroughs, and how generative AI and open source will empower developers and creators. They’ll also discuss the role of generative AI in building virtual worlds, and virtual worlds for building the next wave of AI and robots.
Jensen and Mark’s SIGGRAPH 2024 Keynote Presentation takes place Monday, 29 July.
About Huang and Zuckerberg
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.
Beyond the Illusion of Life
BODYMark Sagar
Double-Academy Award winner Dr. Mark Sagar is the co-founder and Former Chief Science Officer of Soul Machines and Director of the Laboratory for Animate Technologies at the Auckland Bioengineering Institute. Mark and his team are bringing technology to life, pioneering the creation of autonomously animated virtual humans with virtual brains and nervous systems — capable of highly expressive face-to-face interaction and real-time learning and emotional response — to create the next generation of human interaction with biologically inspired artificial intelligence. Mark has a Ph.D. in engineering from the University of Auckland and was a postdoctoral fellow at MIT. He previously worked as the special projects supervisor at Weta Digital and Sony Pictures Imageworks and developed technology for the digital characters in blockbusters such “Avatar,” “King Kong,” and “Spiderman 2.” His pioneering work in computer-generated faces was recognized with two consecutive Scientific and Engineering Oscars in 2010 and 2011. Mark was elected as a fellow of the Royal Society of New Zealand in 2019 and was named New Zealand Innovator of the Year in 2022.
Mark’s SIGGRAPH 2024 Keynote Presentation takes place Monday, 29 July.
View Session Details
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 CEO Fireside Chat: AI and Graphics for the New Computing Revolution
BUILT ENVIRONMENTJensen Huang
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.
Jensen’s SIGGRAPH 2024 Keynote Presentation takes place Monday, 29 July.
View Session Details
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.
Humanity Becoming Interplanetary: Exploring Space for Earth
COSMOSDava Newman
Dr. Newman is the director of the MIT Media Lab, holds the Apollo Program Professor of Astronautics chair at MIT, and is a Harvard–MIT Health Sciences and Technology faculty member. She served as NASA Deputy Administrator (2015–2017). Nominated by President Barack Obama and confirmed by the U.S. Senate unanimously in April 2015, Dr. Newman was the third woman and first female engineer and scientist to serve in this role. During her tenure, she made significant impact on NASA’s human exploration, specifically developing and articulating the Human Journey to Mars plan, highlighting scientific missions, advocating for transformative aeronautics capabilities, developing and implementing a strategic innovation framework, and advocating for diversity and inclusion for NASA and the nation’s STEM initiatives. Dr. Newman’s research expertise is in aerospace biomedical engineering investigating human performance across the spectrum of gravity and AI/ML for the dual challenge of energy and climate. She is a leader in advanced space suit design, astronaut performance, climate modeling and visualization, leadership development, innovation, and space policy. Dr. Newman was the principal investigator on five spaceflight missions. Her keynote will cover the theme of “Humanity Becoming Interplanetary: Exploring Space for Earth” and presents advanced space and climate computer graphics.
Dr. Newman’s SIGGRAPH 2024 Keynote Presentation takes place Tuesday, 30 July.
View Session Details
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.
Image copyright Christopher Michel
The Often Unseen World
MICROSCOPICManu Prakash
Manu Prakash is an associate professor of bioengineering at Stanford University, a Senior Fellow at the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment, a Pew Scholar, and the co-inventor of the Foldscope and co-founder of Foldscope Instruments. At Stanford, Manu runs a curiosity-driven science lab focused on using highly interdisciplinary approaches to understand how computation is embodied in biological matter. His lab is dedicated to inventing, building, and scaling up “frugal science” tools to democratize access to science, including the discovery of the Foldscope, a foldable microscope made mostly of paper. Manu has a Bachelor of Technology from the Indian Institute of Technology and a Master of Science and Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In his SIGGRAPH 2024 Keynote Presentation, Manu will take you on a “microscopic” journey of the often unseen world — a delight of creatures most beautiful and marvelous with dazzling graphical feats. Come for the science, and stay for the community-enabled discoveries made around the world.
Manu’s SIGGRAPH 2024 Keynote Presentation takes place Wednesday, 31 July.
Session details coming soon.
Image credit: Linda A. Cicero/Stanford News Service (main photo); courtesy Foldscope Instruments, Inc. (insets)
