Brian A. Barsky


Biographical Sketch

Brian A. Barsky is Professor of the Graduate School at the University of California, Berkeley with faculty affiliations in Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences (EECS), Optometry, Vision Science, Bioengineering, Berkeley Institute of Design (BID), Berkeley Center for New Media (BCNM), Arts Research Center (ARC), and Berkeley Canadian Studies Program.

He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Optometry (F.A.A.O.), a UC Berkeley Presidential Chair Fellow, a Warren and Marjorie Minner Faculty Fellow in Engineering Ethics and Professional/Social Responsibility, and an ACM Distinguished Speaker. Dr. Barsky was a recipient of an IBM Faculty Development Award and a National Science Foundation Presidential Young Investigator Award.

He was a Visiting Professor at Yale-NUS College in Singapore, in the Department of Computer Graphics and Multimedia in the Faculty of Information Technology at the Brno University of Technology in the Czech Republic, in the Machine Vision and Pattern Recognition Laboratory at the Lappeenranta University of Technology in Finland, at the Laboratoire d'Informatique Fondamentale de Lille (LIFL) of l'Université des Sciences et Technologies de Lille (USTL), at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology in Hong Kong, at the University of Otago in Dunedin, New Zealand, in the Modélisation Géométrique et Infographie Interactive group at l'Institut de Recherche en Informatique de Nantes and l'Ecole Centrale de Nantes, in Nantes, at the University of Toronto, at the School of Computing at the National University of Singapore, at the Laboratoire Image of l'Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Télécommunications in Paris, and he was a visiting researcher with the Computer Aided Design and Manufacturing Group at the Sentralinsitutt for Industriell Forskning (Central Institute for Industrial Research) in Oslo.

He attended McGill University in Montréal, where he received a D.C.S. in engineering and a B.Sc. in mathematics and computer science. He studied computer graphics and computer science at Cornell University in Ithaca, where he earned an M.S. degree. His Ph.D. degree is in computer science from the University of Utah in Salt Lake City.

He is a co-author of the book An Introduction to Splines for Use in Computer Graphics and Geometric Modeling, co-editor of the book Making Them Move: Mechanics, Control, and Animation of Articulated Figures, and author of the book Computer Graphics and Geometric Modeling Using Beta-splines. He has published about 180 technical articles and has been a speaker at many international conferences..

He was the editor of the Computer Graphics and Geometric Modeling series of Morgan Kaufmann Publishers, Inc. from December 1988 to September 2004, the Series Editor for Computer Science for Course Technology, part of Cengage Learning from October 2004 through September 2009, the Series Editor for Computer Graphics, Geometric Modeling, and Animation for Chapman & Hall/CRC from October 2009 through November 2012, and the Editor of the Synthesis Lectures on Computer Graphics, Animation, Computational Photography, and Imaging of the Synthesis Digital Library of Engineering and Computer Science, published by Morgan & Claypool Publishers from 2004 through 2022. He is the former area editor for the journal Graphical Models. He was the Technical Program Committee Chair for the ACM SIGGRAPH '85 conference.

His research interests include computational aesthetics, computational photography, methods for the design and fabrication of contact lenses, computer methods for optometry and ophthalmology, image synthesis, spline curve/surface representations, computer aided geometric design and modeling, CAD/CAM/CIM, interactive and realistic three-dimensional computer graphics, visualization in scientific computing, computer aided cornea modeling and visualization, videokeratography techniques, corneal topographic mapping, medical imaging, virtual environments for surgical simulation, and display technology.

He developed Vision-Realistic Rendering using three-dimensional rendering techniques for the computer generation of synthetic images to simulate the vision of specific individuals based on measuring the wavefront aberrations of their eyes. This led to developing a vision-correcting display to enable specific viewer to see it in sharp focus directly without using any corrective eyewear such as eyeglasses or contact lenses. This was selected by Scientific American as one of 2014's ten "World Changing Ideas."

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