Background
Marc Levoy is the VMware Founders Professor of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering,
Emeritus. He received a Bachelor's and Master's in Architecture from Cornell University in
1976 and 1978, and a PhD in Computer Science from the University of North Carolina at Chapel
Hill in 1989. In the 1970's Levoy worked on computer animation, developing a cartoon
animation system that was used by Hanna-Barbera Productions to make The Flintstones, Scooby
Doo, and other shows. In the 1980's Levoy worked on volume rendering, a technique for
displaying three-dimensional functions such as computed tomography (CT) or magnetic
resonance (MR) data. In the 1990's he worked on 3D laser scanning, culminating in the
Digital Michelangelo Project, in which he and his students spent a year in Italy digitizing
the statues of Michelangelo. In the 2000's he worked on computational photography and
microscopy, including light field imaging as commercialized by Lytro and other companies. At
Stanford he taught computer graphics and the science of art, and digital photography.
Outside of academia, Levoy co-designed the Google book scanner, launched Google's Street
View project, and currently leads a team in Google Research that has worked on Project Glass
and the Nexus 6 HDR+ mode. Awards: Charles Goodwin Sands Medal for best undergraduate thesis
(1976), National Science Foundation Presidential Young Investigator (1991), ACM SIGGRAPH
Computer Graphics Achievement Award (1996), ACM Fellow (2007).