Software Design Track – Discussion Panel

Mike Shah is an Associate Teaching Professor at Northeastern University in the Khoury College of Computer Sciences. His primary teaching interests are in computer systems, computer graphics, and software engineering. His research interests are related to performance engineering (dynamic analysis), software visualization, and computer graphics. Along with teaching and research work, he have juggled occasional consulting work as a 3D Senior Graphics Engineer in C++.

Mike discovered computer science at the age of 13 when googling ”how do I make games”. From that google search, Mike has worked as a freelance game developer, worked in industry for Intel, Sony Playstation, Oblong Industries, and researched at The Ohio Supercomputer Center to name a few. Mike cares about building tools to help programmers monitor and improve the performance of realtime applications– especially games. In Michael’s spare time he is a long distance runner, weight lifter, and amateur pizza maker.

Morgan McGuire is the Chief Scientist at Roblox, channeling and accelerating innovation across the company to build a creative, safe, civil, and scalable Metaverse. Roblox combines social interaction with a dynamic 3D environment and economy, with research impact spanning both technology and social sciences.

Morgan is also known for previous work as a professor, game developer, and industry researcher. As Director of Hyperscale Graphics Research at NVIDIA, Morgan accelerated cloud graphics, esports, ray tracing, and augmented and virtual reality. Morgan's product work includes the NVIDIA RTXGI and Reflex SDKs and RTX GPUs; the Skylanders®, Call of Duty®, Marvel Ultimate Alliance®, and Titan Quest® series of video games series; the Unity game engine; the E Ink display used in the Amazon Kindle®; and the PeakStream high performance computing architecture acquired by Google. Morgan's scientific publications and patents span many areas of computer science, from compilers and networking to 3D graphics.

Morgan cochaired the EuroGraphics Symposium on Rendering, the ACM SIGGRAPH Symposium on Interactive 3D Graphics and Games, the ACM SIGGRAPH Symposium on Non-Photorealistic Animation and Rendering, and the ACM SIGGRAPH / EuroGraphics High Performance Rendering conference, and was the founding Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Computer Graphics Techniques. Morgan is the author or coauthor of “the bible” of 3D, Computer Graphics: Principles & Practice 3rd Edition, The Graphics Codex, Creating Games, the G3D Innovation Engine, the Markdeep document system, and chapters of several GPU Gems, ShaderX, and GPU Pro volumes.

Morgan holds faculty positions at the University of Waterloo and McGill University and was a full professor at Williams College. Morgan received Ph.D. and M.S. degrees from Brown University and M.Eng. and B.S. degrees from MIT.

I am the co-founder of Binomial, a company that specializes in creating image compression software used by top companies in gaming, graphics, mapping, virtual reality, and more. We also contribute heavily to the open source community, sitting on Khronos and W3C to curate standards that make image compression and the web a better place for all, while crafting open image compression standards and stewarding our own open source libraries. Prior to Binomial I worked as a graphics engineer first in creative coding for advertising, then in game engines, then with virtual reality demos before launching Binomial. Within the field of computer science, I'm passionate about finding ways to treat the people behind the computers as well as we can, artistic expression, and mathematics. I look forward to sharing what I can and learning from others here too.

I am an assistant professor in the Computer Science Department at Brown University. My group focuses on developing models and designing algorithms and frameworks to improve the performance and availability of computer networks. In particular, my group explores the critical role that network state plays in determining network performance and availability with the state’s inherent semantics and emergent state management techniques by investigating designs and algorithms to more holistically understand and manage this state. More recently, we have applied this approach to addressing the digital divide, improving microservices/clouds, managing software defined networks, and rethinking CDN designs. Our designs and systems have been deployed at web scale companies, adopted by opensource systems, and acquired by a large hardware manufacturer.