Institute for Creative Technologies

Associate Director for Graphics Research

Paul Debevec leads the Graphics Laboratory at the University of Southern California's Institute for Creative Technologies and is a Research Associate Professor in the USC Computer Science Department. He earned degrees in Math and Computer Engineering at the University of Michigan in 1992 and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from UC Berkeley in 1996.

At USC ICT Debevec has led the development of several Light Stage systems that capture and simulate how people and objects appear under real-world illumination. The Light Stages have been used by studios such as Sony Pictures Imageworks, WETA Digital, and Digital Domain to create photoreal digital actors as part of the Academy Award-winning visual effects in Spider Man 2 and King Kong, the Academy Award-nominated visual effects in Superman Returns, Spider Man 3, Hancock, the Academy-Award winning visual effects in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, and most recently James Cameron's Avatar. The most recent light stage process based on polarized gradient illumination was used in 2008's Digital Emily project, a collaboration with Image Metrics which produced one of the first digital facial performances to cross the "Uncanny Valley". Other recent work led by Debevec includes ICT's 3D Display and 3D Teleconferencing systems.

In 2001 Debevec received ACM SIGGRAPH's first Significant New Researcher Award for "Creative and Innovative Work in the Field of Image-Based Modeling and Rendering", in 2002 was named one of the world's top 100 young innovators by MIT's Technology Review magazine, and in 2005 received a Gilbreth Lectureship from the National Academy of Engineering. In 2005 Debevec received the Special Award for a Distinguished Professional Career in Animation/VFX from the Mundo Digitales Festival in A Coruna, Spain and in 2009 received the "Visionary Award for VFX" at the 3rd Annual Awards for the Electronic and Animated Arts.

In February 2010, Debevec will receive a Scientific and Engineering Academy Award® for "the design and engineering of the Light Stage capture devices and the image-based facial rendering system developed for character relighting in motion pictures", sharing the honor with Tim Hawkins, John Monos, and Mark Sagar.

Debevec is a member of ACM SIGGRAPH, the Visual Effects Society, and co-chaired the 2002 Eurographics Workshop on Rendering. He chaired the SIGGRAPH 2007 Computer Animation Festival and in 2009 was elected to the ACM SIGGRAPH Executive Committee.