James T. Kajiya started his career as a hardware designer. In 1972, at Quad-Eight Electronics, a manufacturer of recording studio consoles, he designed automated mix-down equipment and SMPTE time-code synchronizers. In 1973, he joined the Evans and Sutherland Computer Corp. as the project engineer for the Evans and Sutherland frame buffer, the first commercially available random access frame buffer.

He received a doctorate in computer science from the University of Utah in 1979. His thesis research applied Lie group representation theory to the modeling of the human visual system as a signal processing system to explain a wide range of phenomena in monochrome brightness perception and predict several new visual illusions and phenomena. From 1979 to 1994, Dr. Kajiya was at the California Institute of Technology, first as an assistant professor, then as associate professor of computer science. He has published papers on mathematical models for computer vision, high-level programming languages and mathematical logic for computer science. From 1994 to 1997, Kajiya was a senior researcher at Microsoft Research, where he built and led the graphics group. He is currently a director of research at Microsoft Corp.

His recent work has focused on very high-quality computer graphics. This work has included nonlinear anti-aliasing algorithms for the display of text on raster screens; invention of several new techniques for ray-tracing primitives such as swept volumes, parametric patches and fractal surfaces; an early paper on volume rendering; a hierarchical bounding box technique for accelerating ray tracing; the introduction of anisotropic light reflection models for surfaces; the introduction of algebraic geometry in patch computations; a new technique extending the ray-tracing process via an integral equation, or Monte Carlo algorithm, called the rendering equation; and a solution to the problem of rendering fuzzy surfaces. Most recently, Kajiya has returned to graphics hardware design. He was the principal architect on Talisman, a low-cost hardware architecture for very high-quality real-time 3-D graphics.

Kajiya also served as the principal investigator on a joint research project with IBM Corp. that produced an implementation of Prolog yielding a speed of 0.9 megalips and a new object-oriented systems programming language called FITH. In other work, he explored parallel ray tracing on the IBM RP3 and specified software architecture for scientific visualization in the IBM SVS, which became the Power Visualisation Station. In joint work with TRW, he has served as architect for the FISC-1 and FISC-2 machines, supercomputers oriented toward military signal and image-processing tasks. He also developed a scientific programming language, FEX, suitable for compilation on vector and parallel supercomputers. He is currently working on a language, nuBasic, intended to promote rich multimedia client applications.

Kajiya has served on the external advisory board of the Defense Mapping Agency, on the National Neurocircuitry Database Committee for the National Academy of Sciences and Institute of Medicine, and on the SIGGRAPH executive committee. He received the SIGGRAPH Technical Achievement Award in 1991 and served as the technical program chair for SIGGRAPH 93. In 1997, Kajiya, along with Dr. Timothy Kay, received an Academy Award (technical certificate) for work on rendering hair and fur.

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