Craig Reynolds

Professional Experience

2020 to present

Retired / Unaffiliated Researcher
Studying adversarial evolutionary texture synthesis.

2017 to 2020

RightHook
Senior Software Engineer, AI. Agent-based simulations of vehicle traffic and pedestrians crowds. Focus on interaction of moving agents. The agents determine their own behavior autonomously based on their perception of their local dynamic environment and stored map data. Intended for virtual world testing of automotive systems.

2015 to 2017

Matterport
Senior Software Engineer on Vision Team. Projects related to mobile 3d capture: rendering techniques (surfels and NPR), efficient algorithms for point cloud processing, surfel fusion, GPGPU programming in GLSL.

2014 to 2015

Staples SparX
Software Engineer on projects including client and server side web applications (in Clojure) and some image processing work (using OpenCV).

2013 to 2014

University of California, Santa Cruz
Research Game Developer at the Center for Games and Playable Media working on the Immerse project. Developing procedural facial animation for autonomous characters in a serious game.

1998 to 2012

Sony Computer Entertainment America
Senior Researcher at SCE US Research and Development. Investigating autonomous characters and other technology for games on PlayStation 2 and 3. Public projects include Pigeons in the Park, OpenSteer, PSCrowd, crowd stigmergy and goal-oriented texture synthesis (including a model of camouflage evolution).

1997 to 1998

DreamWorks Animation
Member of Long Term Software Development staff, in the Feature Animation division of DreamWorks SKG. Developed behavioral animation tools.

1994 to 1996

SGI (Silicon Studio) [at archive.org]
MTS in FireWalker team. Developed tools for authoring improvisational behavior in multimedia.

1992 to 1994

Electronic Arts
MTS. Designed and implemented real-time reactive behavioral models for use in video games. Created behaviors used in John Madden Football for 3DO, and for an unreleased hockey game.

1982 to 1991

Symbolics Inc. (Symbolics Graphics Division)
Principal MTS. Design, implement, and maintain a 2d paint system (S-Paint). Design, implement, and maintain an interactive 3d animation scripting system (S-Dynamics). Conduct program in advanced graphics research: produced a behavior model of bird flocking and a geometrical model of surfaces in nonlinear flow.

1979 to 1982

Information International Inc. (Motion Picture Project / Digital Scene Simulation)
Lead animator (technical director) on computer animated scenes for TV commercials and feature film special effects. Developed graphics and animation tools.

1978

Ramtek Corporation

1975 to 1976

ComputerVision Corporation

Education

1978

Master of Science, thesis on procedural animation (Computer Animation in the World of Actors and Scripts [13 citations]), The Architecture Machine Group (now part of The Media Lab), Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

1975

Bachelor of Science, thesis on procedural animation ("A Multiprocessing Approach to Computer Animation") Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Won the William L. Stewart, Jr. Award for founding MITV student television.

Editorial Boards

• Computer Animation and Virtual Worlds: member of the editorial board since the journal's launch (as JV&CA) in 1990 until 2018.
• Artificial Life: member of the editorial board since 2001.
• Computers in Entertainment: member of the editorial board since journal's launch in 2003.
  
• Former member of editorial board of Genetic Programming and Evolvable Machines from the journal's launch in 2000 until 2003.
  

Film credits

Academy Award:

• Winner of a Scientific And Engineering Award presented by The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for pioneering contributions to the development of three dimensional computer animation for motion picture production at the Scientific and Technical Awards of the 70th Academy Awards® presented in 1998.
  

Feature films:

• Looker, 1981, The Ladd Company
• TRON, 1982, Walt Disney Studios
• Batman Returns, 1992, Warner Brothers

Short films:

• The Juggler, 1981, Information International Inc. (theme animation from triple-I's Sample Reel)
• (Stanley and Stella in) Breaking the Ice, 1987, Symbolics and Whitney/Demos
• Behave, 1988, Rebecca Allen
• Ductile Flow, 1990, Symbolics (SVR Issue 61, item 12)
• Virtually Yours, 1991, Symbolics (Matt Elson)
  

Technical publications

Peer-reviewed conference and journal articles (16,000 citations listed by Google Scholar, December 2020):

• Reynolds, C. W. (1982) Computer Animation with Scripts and Actors, in Computer Graphics, 16(3) (SIGGRAPH '82 Conference Proceedings) pages 289-296. [300 citations]
  
• Reynolds, C. W. (1987) Flocks, Herds, and Schools: A Distributed Behavioral Model, in Computer Graphics, 21(4) (SIGGRAPH '87 Conference Proceedings) pages 25-34. [12,000 citations]
  This paper was selected for republication in 1998 in ACM SIGGRAPH's Seminal Graphics: Pioneering Efforts That Shaped The Field see also this article about the selection process.
  
• Reynolds, C. W. (1993) An Evolved, Vision-Based Behavioral Model of Coordinated Group Motion, in From Animals to Animats 2: Proceedings of the Second International Conference on Simulation of Adaptive Behavior (SAB92), Meyer, Roitblat and Wilson editors, ISBN 0-262-63149-0, MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, pages 384-392. [162 citations]
• Reynolds, C. W. (1993) An Evolved, Vision-Based Model of Obstacle Avoidance Behavior, in Artificial Life III (held in 1992), Santa Fe Institute Studies in the Sciences of Complexity, Proceedings Volume XVI, C. Langton, Editor, ISBN 0-201-62494-X, Addison-Wesley, Redwood City, California, pages 327-346. [80 citations]
• Reynolds, C. W. (1994) Evolution of Obstacle Avoidance Behavior: Using Noise to Promote Robust Solutions, in Advances in Genetic Programming, K. E. Kinnear, Jr., Ed., ISBN 0-262-11188-8, MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, pages 221-242. [91 citations]
• Reynolds, C. W. (1994) The Difficulty of Roving Eyes, in Computational Intelligence: Imitating Life (Proceedings of the 1994 IEEE World Congress on Computational Intelligence) Orlando, Florida, USA, June 27-29, ISBN 0-7803-1104-3, IEEE Press, pages 262-267. [10 citations]
• Reynolds, C. W. (1994) Evolution of Corridor Following Behavior in a Noisy World, in From Animals to Animats 3: Proceedings of the Third International Conference on Simulation of Adaptive Behavior (SAB94), D. Cliff, P. Husbands, J-A Meyer, and S. Wilson, Editors, ISBN 0-262-53122-4, MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, pages 402-410. [100 citations]
• Reynolds, C. W. (1994) Competition, Coevolution and the Game of Tag, in the proceedings of Artificial Life IV, R. Brooks and P. Maes, Editors, ISBN 0-262-52190-3, MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, pages 59-69. [171 citations]
• Reynolds, C. (2006) Big Fast Crowds on PS3. In Proceedings of Sandbox (an ACM Video Games Symposium), Boston, Massachusetts, July 2006, pages 113-121. [120 citations]
• Reynolds, C. (2011) Interactive Evolution of Camouflage, in Artificial Life, 17(2), doi:10.1162/artl_a_00023, pages 123-136.
  Originally appeared in the Proceedings of ALife XII (12th International Conference on the Synthesis and Simulation of Living System), held Aug 19-23 2010 in Odense, Denmark.
  
• Reynolds, C. (2011) Evolving Textures from High Level Descriptions: Gray with an Accent Color, in C. Di Chio et al. (Eds.): evoApplications 2011 (Applications of Evolutionary Computation). LNCS Springer.
  
• Shapiro, D., Tanenbaum, K., McCoy, J., LeBron, L., Reynolds, C., Stern, A., Mateas, M., Ferguson, B., Diller, D., Moffitt, K. Coon, W., Roberts, B., (2015) Composing Social Interactions via Social Games, in Proceedings of the 2015 International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS), pp. 573-580 (open access PDF).
• Reynolds, C. (2016) Evolving Textures from High Level Descriptions, in International Journal of Arts and Technology (IJART), 9(1), doi:10.1504/IJART.2016.075407, pages 26-38.

Other articles (unreviewed or self-published):

• Reynolds, C. (1977) Filling Polygons, in Architecture Machinations, newsletter of the Architecture Machine Group, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 3(17), May 3, 1977 pages 3-8. (Early description of trapezoidal decomposition of polygons.)
  
• Reynolds, C. W. (1985) Description and Control of Time and Dynamics in Computer Animation, in the notes for the SIGGRAPH '85 course Advanced Computer Animation, published by ACM SIGGRAPH.
  
• Reynolds, C. W. (1988) Not Bumping Into Things, in the notes for the SIGGRAPH '88 course Developments in Physically-Based Modeling, pages G1-G13, published by ACM SIGGRAPH. [60 citations]
• Reynolds, C. W. (1992) Adaptive Polyhedral Resampling for Vertex Flow Animation, unpublished. [3 citations]
• Reynolds, C. W. (1999) Steering Behaviors For Autonomous Characters, in the proceedings of Game Developers Conference 1999, Miller Freeman Game Group, San Francisco, California, pages 763-782. [1900 citations]
• Reynolds, C. W. (2000) Interaction with Groups of Autonomous Characters, in the proceedings of Game Developers Conference 2000, CMP Game Media Group (formerly: Miller Freeman Game Group), San Francisco, California, pages 449-460. [120 citations]

Presentations

• 1982, February 3: Hewlett Packard, Palo Alto, Computer Colloquium Series: Computer Graphics and Animation for Commercial Art.
• 1983, October 31: Asilomar Conference on Circuits, Systems and Computers invited talk Computer Graphics and Animation for Commercial Art.
• 1984, January 27, Optics in Entertainment II, SPIE Volume 462, Los Angeles, High powered graphical work stations for one or fewer users.
  Described Symbolics graphics systems and the notion of distributing computations across unused personal computers, as we used back then for rendering and as used today for Folding@home and similar projects. Many thinks to Michael Naimark for remembering these details in 2007!
• 1987: SIGGRAPH 87 panel Tool Kits: A Product of Their Environments along with Ken Perlin, Jim Blinn, Tom Duff and Bill Lorensen.
• 1989: SIGGRAPH 89 Special Session Bloopers, Outtakes, and Horror Stories of SIGGRAPH Films along with: John Lasseter, Bill Reeves, Loren Carpenter, Eben Ostby, Michael Wahrman, Jim Blinn, Chris Wedge, Graham Walters and Bill Kroyer.
  
• 1992: SIGGRAPH 92 panel Artificial Life, along with Chair Steven Levy and other panelists: Chris Langton, Przemyslaw Prusinkiewicz, Karl Sims and Larry Yaeger.
• 1995: invited lecture on Authoring Autonomous Characters in the Distinguished Lecture Series of the Graphics, Visualization & Usability Center at Georgia Institute of Technology.
• 1995, 1996, 1997 and 1998: spoke on Behavioral Animation for Movies and Multimedia at the SIGGRAPH course Artificial Life for Graphics, Animation, Multimedia, and Virtual Reality.
• 1998: panelist at the SIGGRAPH 98 panel on Behavioral Modeling and Animation: Past, Present, and Future
• 1999: speaker at EVALife's first international workshop on Interdisciplinary Concepts for the Analysis of Complex Systems at the University of Aarhus, Denmark. (My slides. The EVALife workshop described in this newsletter.)
• 2000: Artificial Life for Computer Games tutorial at Game developers Conference 2000, organized by John Funge with Bruce Blumberg, Demetri Terzopoulos.
• 2000: presentation on Autonomous Characters for Games and Animation, in Prof. Jean-Claude Latombe's course on Digital Actors, May 1.
  
• 2000: speaker and co-organizer (with Chris Hecker) of the SIGGRAPH 2000 course Games Research: the Science of Interactive Entertainment.
• 2000: lecture on Reactive Autonomous Characters in the Fall 2000 Distinguished Lecture Series on Computer Games presented by the University of Michigan's Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.
• 2001: Artificial Life for Computer Games tutorial at Game developers Conference 2001, along with organizer John Funge and Bruce Blumberg, Demetri Terzopoulos, March 22.
  
• 2001: Steering Behaviors: Autonomous Characters in Three Worlds, presentation in Prof. James O'Brien's computer animation course at UC Berkeley, (slides), April 23.
  
• 2003: presentation on OpenSteer, along with my SCE US R&D colleagues Dominic Mallinson, Richard Marks, Robin Green and Gabor Nagy at a seminar series at Pixar, September 29.
  
• 2006: Crowd Simulation on PS3 [slides] lecture at Game Developers Conference 2006.
• 2006: High Performance Multi-Processor Crowd Simulation invited talk at AIIDE 2006.
• 2006: Columbus College of Art & Design invited talk in the Visiting Artist program: Steering Behaviors for Autonomous Characters in Games and Animation.
• 2008: Emergent Teamwork invited talk at the Cognitive Animation Workshop, with demo of collective construction simulation with stigmergy, June 5.
  
• 2008: Birds, Bees, and Boids an introduction to swarm intelligence for a general audience. Invited talk in the Ask a Scientist Lecture Series (San Francisco Science Cafe) June 11.
  
• 2008: short presentation on "Non-Trudging crowds" in the Sandbox 2008 panel Four views of procedural character animation for computer games along with Ken Perlin, Chris Hecker and Friedrich Kirschner, August 10.
• 2008: Crowds and Emergent Teamwork, invited talk, Industrial Light & Magic, San Francisco, October 2.
  
• 2009: Crowds and Emergent Teamwork, invited talk, University of California Santa Cruz (UCSC) video , January 23.
• 2009: Crowds and Emergent Teamwork, invited talk, PARC, (slides), June 25.
  
• 2010: Crowds and Emergent Teamwork, invited keynote address, Computer Animation and Social Agents, CASA2010, St Malo, France, (slides), June 2.
• 2010: Interactive Evolution of Camouflage, lecture at Stanford's Computer Systems Colloquium EE380, (video), October 6.
• 2011: Goal-Oriented Texture Synthesis, invited keynote address, evo* (evoSTAR 2011) conference, Torino, Italy, (slides), April 29.
  
• 2011: Research Retrospective, invited talk at Université de Technologie de Compiègne, France, May 3.
• 2011: Goal-Oriented Texture Synthesis, lunch talk series, Visual Computation Lab, University of California Berkeley, September 22.
• 2012: Interactive Evolution of Camouflage, presentation at MIT's CSAIL, Cambridge, MA, (announcement), February 24.
• 2012: Goal-Oriented Texture Synthesis, presented at DreamWorks Animation, Redwood City, CA, April 26
• 2012: Goal-Oriented Texture Synthesis (with application to Interactive Evolution of Camouflage), presentation at Intel’s Visual Applications Research Lab, May 30.
• 2013: Self-Organization and Optimization for Graphics and Animation, presentation at EPGY 2013—Artificial Intelligence, at Stanford University, (slides), July 31.
• 2013: Steering Behaviors, guest lecture in CMPS146 Game AI, University of California, Santa Cruz, (slides), October 16.
• 2015: Computational Models of Natural Complexity, presentation at the 5th Student Conference on Complexity Science, Granada, Andalusia, Spain, (slides), September 9.
  
• 2015: Computational Models of Natural Complexity, presentation at Reflections|Projections at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, (slides), October 2.
• 2016: Steering Behaviors, guest lecture in CMPM146 Game AI, University of California, Santa Cruz, (slides), February 26.

Other professional activities

• Frequent reviewer for conferences and journals. SIGGRAPH: paper reviewer most years from 1985 to present, served on Papers Committee in 1992. SIGGRAPH Asia: paper reviewer 2008 to present. Other conferences: Artificial Life, AIIDE, I3D, SCA, Eurographics, SAB, Sandbox, GECCO, Pacific Graphics. Other journals: Artificial Life, TOG, CAVW, TCIAIG, IJART, GPEM, CG&A, JTB, PLoS ONE, Simulation, TVCG, ICAE, JoGD...
• Created two images selected for SIGGRAPH proceedings cover: Arch Fractal in 1981, TRON Sea of Simulation in 1982.
• Developed a prototype self-driving controller for Overbot, an entrant in the 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge.
• Served on organizing committee for AAAI-04's Workshop on Challenges in Game AI, July 25-26, 2004 in San Jose, California.
  
• Served on a review panel for NSF's Cyber-enabled Discovery and Innovation (CDI) program in 2009.
• Continuing education (MOOC):
      Machine Learning, Andrew Ng, Fall 2012 (Cousera)
      Introduction to Artificial Intelligence, Sebastian Thrun and Peter Norvig, Fall 2011 (Stanford).
      Algorithms, Tim Roughgarden, January 2013 (Coursera)
• Contributor to OpenCV 3.0

Craig Reynolds <cwr@red3d.com>
Last update: December 22, 2020