People

Board of Directors

Scott Snibbe is a well known interactive media researcher, entrepreneur and artist who pioneered interactive projections in 1998 with Boundary Functions. He has held engineering and management positions at Adobe Systems and Interval Research Corporation and teaching and research positions at UC Berkeley, NYU’s Courant Institute of Mathematics, San Francisco Art Institute, and California Institute for the Arts. He holds over a dozen patents for interactive media technologies. In addition to commercial works, Snibbe’s interactive media artwork is in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art (NY), the Whitney Museum (NY), and other prominent institutions. Scott has received research grants and awards from the National Science Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, Rockefeller Foundation and Ford Foundation. A regular worldwide speaker, He holds a B.Sc. in Computer Science and a dual B.A. in Computer Science/Animation from Brown University and the Rhode Island School of design. Scott is the founder of Snibbe Interactive, Inc. whose focus is the commercialization of personalized social interactive media; and Sona Research, an organization dedicated to research into the socially beneficial applications of interactive technologies.

Beau Takahara, is the Director of Individual Gifts at the Exploratorium, a museum of science, art and human perception in San Francisco. Prior to this she was the Development Director to the Innocence Project at Santa Clara University Law School, Santa Clara, California. She was also Co-Founder and for five years the Director and CEO of the non-profit organization ZeroOne – The Art and Technology Network located in Silicon Valley which launched a biennale international festival of Art and Technology in San Jose in 2006. She co-founded ZeroOne after five years at The Tech Museum of Innovation in San Jose where she worked as a fundraiser on the Capital Campaign and the Annual Fund. While at The Tech, Beau curated an art and technology lecture series and arranged for two art and technology exhibits, one from Interval Research, including work by Scott Snibbe, and one from Xerox PARC, to each be installed for a six month period in the new Tech. Prior to her time at The Tech, Beau worked with a number of not-for-profit art organizations including Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco; and George Coates Performance Works, San Francisco, where she was executive director for three years and involved in large-scale, leading-edge productions of new music theater utilizing state-of-the-art technologies.  While at The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art for nine years, she curated video and media exhibits, produced a large computer graphics festival in conjunction with SIGGRAPH, and organized the first museum screening of HDTV, as part of a large seven week festival: Tokyo Form and Spirit which she conceived of and produced. Beau is past Board Chair of The Lab, an alternative arts organization in San Francisco that presents experimental work by visual and performance artists, and was also on the boards of Video Free America and the Point Foundation. She received a BFA in art and art history from The University of Utah and did graduate studies in art history at the University of Iowa.

Dr. Christof Bregler is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at NYU’s Courant Institute. He received his M.S. and Ph.D. in Computer Science from U.C. Berkeley in 1995 and 1998 and his Diplom from Karlsruhe University in 1993. Prior to NYU he was on the faculty at Stanford University and worked for several companies including Hewlett Packard, Interval, Disney Feature Animation, and LucasFilm’s ILM. He founded the Stanford Movement Group and the NYU Movement Group, which does research in Vision and Graphics with a focus on Motion Capture, Animation, Interactive Media, and Applications to Entertainment, Art, and Medicine. This resulted in numerous publications, patents, and awards from the National Science Foundation, Sloan Foundation, Packard Foundation, Office of Naval Research, Electronic Arts, Microsoft, and other sources. He was named Stanford Joyce Faculty Fellow and Terman Fellow in 1999. He received the Olympus Prize for achievements in computer vision and AI in 2002, and was named a Sloan Research Fellow in 2003. He was the chair for the SIGGRAPH 2004 Electronic Theater and Computer Animation Festival. At CVPR 2008 he was awarded the IEEE Longuet-Higgins Prize for “Fundamental Contributions in Computer Vision that have withstood the test of time”.

Research Advisors

Hiroshi Ishii, Ph.D. is the director of MIT’s Tangible Media Group.
Joyce Ma, Ph.D. is a Senior Researcher at The Exploratorium.
Joshua Gutwill, Ph.D. is the Acting Director of Visitor Research and Evaluation at The Exploratorium.
Tom Leeser is the Director of the Center for Integrated Media, California Institute of the Arts.
Christiane Paul is an Associate Curator of Digital Art, Whitney Museum of American Art.

Contributing Staff

Scott Snibbe is the Executive Director of Sona Research.
Hayes Raffle, Ph.D. is a researcher in human-computer interaction and product designer.
Peiyi Ko Ph.D. is a graduate student in human factors and environmental health with an M.F.A. in dance.
Connie Shi is a computer graphics and game programmer.
Alan Shimoide is a computer graphics/vision programming manager and engineer with background in biochemistry computer vision research and 3D reconstruction.
Noah Cunningham creates video, animation and special effects.

Collaborators

Annie Loui is a director/choreographer and professor of theatre/dance at UC Irvine.
Paul Kaiser is a digital artist and writer.
Marc Downie, Ph.D. is an artificial intelligence researcher and artist.