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Technical Advisory Council

The Technical Advisory Council (TAC) provides technical leadership for the Foundation. Its functions include:

  • establishing best practices and policies for the technical community
  • identifying any resource or development gaps
  • coordinating the community to address gaps
  • proposing new projects to the Governing Board
  • coordinating cross-project opportunities (e.g. a dev summit)

TAC Representatives

Bill Roberts

Industry Strategist at Adobe

Bill Roberts is Industry Strategist at Adobe

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Brian Cipriano

Senior Software Engineer, Google

Brian is a Senior Software Engineer at Google and a Tech Lead on the Google's Cloud Media team, where he oversees and develops various products and solutions for media and entertainment customers.

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Carol Payne

Imaging Technologist at Netflix, Inc.

Carol is a Imaging Technologist at Netflix, Inc.

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Cary Phillips

R&D Supervisor, Industrial Light & Magic

Cary Phillips is R&D Supervisor at Industrial Light & Magic in San Francisco, where he has worked since 1994. He holds a PhD in computer graphics from the University of Pennsylvania.

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Christopher Kulla

Senior Rendering Programmer at Epic Games

Christopher Kulla leads the Open Shading Language project and is a Senior Rendering Programmer at Epic Games

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Cory Omand

Supervising Lead Software Engineer, Pixar Animation Studios

Cory Omand is a Supervising Lead Software Engineer at Pixar Animation studios, responsible for Pixar’s internal software development and deployment platform, used by R&D and production teams to produce high-quality film production pipelines.

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Dr. Michael B. Johnson

Pro Workflow Architect, Systems Architecture & Design at Apple

Dr. Michael B. Johnson is a member of the Pro Workflow team at Apple.

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Eric Enderton

Director of Film Rendering Technology at NVIDIA

Eric Enderton is Director of Film Rendering Technology at NVIDIA, developing and supporting the use of GPU ray tracing for visual effects and animation. He is a founder of DigiPro, the Digital Production Symposium.

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Eric Reinecke

Sr. Software Engineer, Video Engineering at Netflix

Eric Reinecke is a Senior Software Engineer at Netflix with a focus on enabling filmmakers through editorial pipelines from lens to screen. Previous to Netflix, Eric led the creation of cloud-based original camera file ingest and massively parallelized encoding at PIX System and built pipelines to serve as the global hub for story, editorial, and assets at Lucasfilm Animation. Eric is also one of the co-creators of OpenTimelineIO.

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Gordon Bradley

Senior Software Architect, Autodesk Inc

Gordon joined Alias Wavefront in 2002 to work on Maya, where he had an intense introduction to sub-zero temperatures, shovelling snow and hockey. He’s currently the architect for Autodesk’s entertainment products, including Maya.

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Greg Denton

Senior Program Manager, Microsoft Azure

Greg is a Senior Program Manager at Microsoft Azure where he focuses on enabling cloud workflows for Media and Entertainment customers.

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Jean-François Panisset

Jean-François Panisset has been a member of the Visual Effects Society Technology Committee since 2013. The VES Technology Committee was involved in the process leading to the creation of the ASWF and has been responsible for the closely related VFX Reference Platform project.

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Jean-Michel Dignard

Tools Engineering Director at Epic Games, Inc

Jean-Michel is an engineering director at Epic Games, Inc for the Unreal Editor

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Jonathan Stone

Lead Rendering Engineer, Materials and Shading

Jonathan Stone is a Lead Rendering Engineer in the Lucasfilm Advanced Development Group and the lead developer of MaterialX.

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Joshua Minor

Pixar Studio Tools Story/Editorial/VR Previs Tech Lead, Pixar

Joshua is the Pixar Studio Tools Story/Editorial/VR Previs Tech Lead and OpenTimelineIO TSC chairperson

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Ken Museth

Senior Director in Simulation Technology, NVIDIA

Ken Museth is the Senior Director in Simulation Technology at NVIDIA, and he is the founding developer of OpenVDB.

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Kimball Thurston

Senior Researcher, Weta Digital Ltd.

Kimball Thurston is a senior researcher at Weta Digital Ltd. in New Zealand, focused on rendering and related imaging areas.

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Larry Gritz

Software Engineering Architect, Sony Pictures Imageworks

Dr. Larry Gritz is the Software Engineering Architect for Sony Pictures Imageworks, developing rendering technology as well as managing SPI's open source efforts.

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Mark Visser

Sr. Manager Engineering, M&E at Unity Technologies

Mark leads the team developing animation- and VFX-related features for the Unity Editor.

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Matthew Low

Principal Engineer at DreamWorks Animation

Matthew Low is a Principal Engineer and Technical Lead at DreamWorks Animation, focusing on technical strategy and integration efforts for USD and real time game engine technologies within the feature film pipeline, as well as representing DreamWorks to the Academy Software Foundation on the Technical Advisory Council. Matthew graduated from Cornell University with a degree in Engineering Physics and Computer Science, and a M.S. in Computer Graphics.

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Sean Looper

Software Development Manager, AWS Creative Tools

Sean and his team focus on cloud-centric technology exclusively for content creation industries.

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Sean McDuffee

Graphics Software Engineer at Intel

Sean McDuffee is a Graphics Software Engineer at Intel with the Advanced Rendering and Graphics Architecture Group.

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Sean O’Connell

Member of Technical Staff Software Engineer, Advanced Micro Devices

Sean O'Connell is a Member of Technical Staff at Advanced Micro Devices with the Software Performance Engineering team, responsible for improving performance across AMD's line of client processors.

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Tony Micilotta

Director, Product Development at DNEG

Tony is Director, Product Development at DNEG

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