SIGGRAPH Asia 2012 Set for Nov. 28-Dec.1 in Singapore

SIGGRAPH Asia will return to the city where it started, with the five-year-old confab scheduled to take place Nov. 28-Dec. 1 in Singapore.

The annual convention for the best artists working in animation, digital art, graphics and technology industries also announced its first speakers: Karlheinz Brandenburg, creator of the MP3 format; and Richard Chuang, co-founder of PDI/DreamWorks.

Here’s how the conference describes the speakers’ careers:

• Hailed as the father of MP3, Karlheinz Brandenburg discovered the audio compression format as a specialist in mathematics working on ways to compress music files. This far-reaching invention had previously only been used in university research until it later became commercially available. His honors include the AES Silver Medal, the IEEE Masaru Ibuka Consumer Electronic Award, the German Future Award, which he shared with his colleagues and the Cross of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany. Brandenburg is a professor at the Institute for Media Technology at Ilmenau Technical University and director of the Fraunhofer Institute for Digital Media Technology in Ilmenau, Germany.
• Co-founder of PDI/DreamWorks over 30 years ago, Richard Chuang pioneered the studio’s proprietary animation system, which received an Academy Technical Achievement Award in 1998. Chuang’s expertise is in computer animation and visual effects for both animated and live action films. Besides the feature length animated films at PDI/DreamWorks, he helmed the CG production for DreamWorks’ first all computer animated primetime TV show, Father of the Pride in 2005. He was also the executive responsible for developing production capacity worldwide for DreamWorks Animation, including multi-national productions in Asia and Europe.

“This year’s SIGGRAPH Asia conference in Singapore seeks to balance the mix of industry and academia,” said Dr. Susanto Rahardja, conference chair for SIGGRAPH Asia 2012, chair of the ACM SIGGRAPH Chapter in Singapore and head of the Signal Processing Department at the Institute for Infocomm Research, A*STAR, Singapore.

For full details on SIGGRAPH Asia 2012, visit its site at www.siggraph.org/asia2012.

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