March 3rd (Mon.), Professor Pat Hanrahan gave a lecture at the Hachioji Campus’s Katayanagi Advanced Research Laboratories Room KE402 commemorating his reception of the Katayanagi Prize.

First, Hiroyuki Kameda, the Dean of the School of Computer of Science introduced Prof. Pat Hanrahan.
Prof. Pat Hanrahan designed the RenderMan specification during his time at Pixar, not long after the company’s founding. RenderMan is an interface specification that sets up how CG geometric models are seen and relays this to CG software that produce high quality images. Most major CG films today are created using RenderMan. Prof. Hanrahan is a pioneer who has produced many advanced CG technology even after shifting to the world of academic research. He is ranked No. 1 in the Top authors in graphics section of Microsoft Academic Search.

The introduction was followed by a commemorative lecture by Prof. Hanrahan.
In his lecture titled, “People, Data and Analysis”, Prof. Hanrahan touched upon the increasing future importance of interactive visualization technology in helping people make appropriate decisions based on large data sets. He started off from a 2D chart as an example of the easiest type of visualization and then went on to the impacts of creating graphs and analysis of large data. He also commented on the importance of statistics and that the further evolution of computer processing capabilities will likely enable interactive visualization and analysis of large data on the spot. Prof. Hanrahan has extended his scope of research from 3D CG to visualization of large data sets and he may be in the process of creating new standards in the world of data analysis and visualization just like he did with RenderMan in CG production.

Following the lecture, a research poster was presented in front of Prof. Hanrahan at the Katayanagi Advanced Research Laboratories Media Technology Center. Graduate students and faculty also introduced the results of research related to visual simulation and the session proved to be an invaluable opportunity for them to receive comments from the professor himself. Additionally, young researchers from the UEI research team, who have partnered with the School of Media Science in academic-industrial alliance, also introduced a poster. The poster session was also attended by Prof. Tomoyuki Nishida, Director of UEI Research (Visiting professor to the TUT Graduate School), which made for two ACM SIGGRAPH Coons winners attending the session.