Kurt Akeley Principal Researcher Microsoft Research Silicon Valley

Kurt is a principal researcher at Microsoft Research Silicon Valley (MSR-SVC), where he works in the areas of computer graphics and computer architecture. His research interests include graphics system architecture and the design of displays that better accommodate human visual requirements. He joined Microsoft in July of 2004. From January 2005 through March 2007 Kurt was an assistant managing director of Microsoft Research Asia in Beijing.

Kurt co-founded Silicon Graphics in 1982. During his 19 years at Silicon Graphics he led the development of several high-end graphics systems, including GTX, VGX, and RealityEngine. He also led the development of OpenGL, an industry-standard programming interface to high-performance graphics hardware. His last full-time position with Silicon Graphics was senior vice president and CTO.

Kurt is a named inventor on fourteen patents, a fellow of the ACM, and a member of the National Academy of Engineering. In 1995 he was the recipient of the ACM SIGGRAPH Computer Graphics Achievement Award. He was awarded a BEE degree from the University of Delaware in 1980 and an MSEE degree from Stanford in 1982. He returned to Stanford and earned a PhD in electrical engineering in 2004.

Current and Recent Activities

• Papers chair for SIGGRAPH Asia 2008, the first of a new sequence of SIGGRAPH conferences to be held annually in Asia.
• Guest editor, with Pat Hanrahan, of the ACM Queue March/April 2008 special issue on GPUs.
• Taught CS248, Introduction to Computer Graphics, at Stanford during the Autumn quarter of 2007. (Wow, this was a lot of work!)
• With Pat Hanrahan, co-taught CS448, Real-Time Graphics Architectures, at Stanford during the Spring quarter of 2007.

Selected Publications

• David M. Hoffman, Ahna R. Girshick, Kurt Akeley, and Martin S. Banks (2008), Vergence-accommodation conflicts hinder visual performance and cause visual fatigue, Journal of Vision, 8(3):33 pp. 1-30.
• Kurt Akeley and Jonathan Su (2006), Minimum triangle separation for correct Z-buffer occlusion, Proceedings of the ACM SIGGRAPH/EUROGRAPHICS Workshop on Graphics Hardware, pp. 27-30.
• Simon J. Watt, Kurt Akeley, Marc O. Ernst, and Martin S. Banks (2005), Focus cues affect perceived depth, Journal of Vision, 5, pp. 834-862.
• Kurt Akeley (2004), Achieving near-correct focus cues using multiple image planes, Stanford PhD Dissertation, June.
• Kurt Akeley, Simon J. Watt, Ahna Reza Girshick, and Martin S. Banks (2004), A stereo display prototype with multiple focal distances, ACM Transactions on Graphics, pp. 804-813.
• Bill Mark, Steven Glanville, Kurt Akeley, and Mark Kilgard (2003), Cg: A system for programming graphics hardware in a C-like language, ACM Transactions on Graphics, pp. 896-907, July.
• Kurt Akeley (1993), RealityEngine graphics, ACM SIGGRAPH Conference Proceedings, pp. 109-116.
• Mark Segal and Kurt Akeley (1992), The OpenGL graphics system: a specification, Silicon Graphics, Inc.
• Paul Haeberli and Kurt Akeley (1990), The accumulation buffer: hardware support for high-quality rendering, ACM SIGGRAPH Conference Proceedings, pp. 309-318.
• Kurt Akeley and Tom Jermoluk (1988), High-performance polygon rendering, ACM SIGGRAPH Conference Proceedings, pp. 239-246.