Perry Kivolowitz

Perry Kivolowitz was an adjunct faculty member during the 1998 and 1999 school years. He developed the department's first course in Computer Graphics. In 2006, he rejoined the department in an administrative and technical capacity.

He founded or co-founded four companies in the digital visual effects and computer graphics fields. Two of these grew to more than 30 people in size.

In 1992 he received an Emmy certificate for his work on the award winning television series Babylon 5.

In 1996 he received an Academy Award for Scientific and Technical Achievement for the invention of shape-driven warping and morphing which is still considered state-of-the-art.

Notable early example uses of this invention include the films Forrest Gump and Titanic. Many recent films including The Dark Knight, The Lord of the Rings trilogy, King Kong and all of the Harry Potter films were produced using software to which he contributes.

Perry's passion for computers and computer science began in the early 1970s and was inspired by Michael Crichton's Terminal Man. Of historical interest, the first computers Perry developed on was the HP 9835B followed by the IBM 1130 and the Univac 1110. Most enjoyable were his years on the PDP/LSI 11 series and the Commodore Amiga in the ecosystem of which he was a well known figure.

In the late 70's Perry learned the C programming language by reading the source code of Unix version 6 (received directly from Ken Thompson) and the Empire game by Peter Langston. Today Perry prefers to program in C# which he considers "delightful."

From 1981 to 1984 Perry was a PhD student at the Computer Science department at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. His graduate career there is a cautionary tale of what not to do as a graduate student. After three years working in an area of computer graphics that was simply too far ahead of its time he burned out ABD.

While his interest in computer graphics continues, Perry has a growing interest in the area of database management systems. There is probably no place better to be than UW-Madison if your interest is in DB.

Perry holds three United States patents:

• 5,881,321 Camera motion sensing system
• 5,754,180 Computer system and process for defining and manipulating images using structured objects with variable edge characteristics
• 5,077,604 Color printing, correction, and conversion apparatus and method

Location:	Room 5353
Email:	perryk
Phone:	2-0620

External Links:
A Personal Page