The 15th edition of SIGGRAPH Asia, ACM SIGRAPH’s annual conference and trade exhibition on computer graphics and interactive techniques in Asia, held at EXCO in Daegu brought the crème minds under one roof. NVIDIA strategic researcher engagement – APAC and EMEA director and past CSIRO and UNSW’s Expanded Perception & Interaction Centre (EPICentre) director Tomasz Bednarz, who had chaired SIGGRAPH Asia 2019, mentioned how meeting all the collaborators and members of the international community face to face this year gave him immense joy.
In an exclusive interview with Animation Xpress, he dwelt upon how scalable platforms and technological advancement is helping in addressing different issues and scaling new heights.
The expert explained that today’s modern accelerators and GPUs could do magic that was not possible in the past. The latest supercomputing possibilities now help to solve many problems in this world across sectors.
The evolution of computing capabilities helps us with digital tools and it has various applications in different industries like construction, VFX, artificial intelligence and so on. He pointed out that using AI, the simulation space has touched new heights. In NVIDIA he has seen that fluid simulation, air flow and other such things can be accelerated and done accurately, saving a lot of time.
Talking about the metaverse, he shared, “Metaverse is a concept, not a thing. We have to define it properly like we had to define big data in the past. Metaverse is something we are really passionate about,” said Bednarz.
He spoke about the NVIDIA Omniverse platform and how it enables the use of metaverse applications of the future. This is a platform which enable new collaborations to happen, kind of integrating different software packages (like Maya, etc) and acts as a connector between them.
“Omniverse doesn’t change the way you do the work, it just enables you to do more,” Bednarz said. It can be connected to AI pipelines, robotic simulations, AI models and so on.
NVIDIA had recently announced that they are partnering with Microsoft to construct a large-scale AI cloud computer. According to the Physics and Applied Computer Science expert, this will enable various enterprises to use scalable platforms to solve most of the problems related to environments, economy, energy, public health systems and so on.
“All of these problems require robust, scalable and powerful computational platforms,” he pointed.
Bednarz is very passionate about computer graphics. Since his training days he has had a problem solving attitude. “My advice to young people and researchers is not to be scared. Try different means, experiment different methods and I think the best learning is practice,” he said.
The learned technological genius suggests the young generation to try everything that excites them. Also, attending specialised conferences is very helpful. For instance, SIGGRAPH and SIGGRAPH Asia brings people who have different angles and perspectives under one roof, which can be very inspirational.
Next year’s SIGGRAPH Asia edition will be hosted in Sydney, Australia from 12-15 December 2023. Bednarz who worked earlier at UNSW and CSIRO, and currently lives and work for NVIDIA in Sydney is eagerly looking forward to the upcoming conference.
