At Pixar since 2000, John modeled sets and did articulation and effects on Oscar-winner Finding Nemo, was technical lead for sets on the Golden Globe-winner Cars, and sets supervisor on Up and Cars 2. He was the supervising technical director on Disney-Pixar’s 2016 feature, Finding Dory, and recently completed work as the supervising technical director on Coco VR.
One of the biggest pain points for Autonomous Vehicle Simulation is generation of content: the assets that create the environments that set the stage for simulation. Those simulations are extensively used for training of Machine Learning models, with computer vision applications being one of the most prevalent. This session is for Unity game artists and programmers who want to learn about how their Unity game development experience can transfer to an entirely new and burgeoning market where there is great demand for their skills.
Jose leads the autonomous vehicles strategies, part of Unity's Industrial initiatives. Before that, he spent 17 years on Microsoft on several projects, from real-time communications to enterprise security systems. He started his Machine Learning career working on content filtering solutions for Family Safety back in 2006. He headed the team that delivered the first anti-phishing features (SmartScreen) in Internet Explorer 7. Later, he joined Bing Ads, where he lead the development of paid search relevance models on mobile devices. On his last 2 years at Microsoft, he worked on Bing Maps, developing geospatial and map creation technology, continuing that work during almost 2 years at Uber. In May 2017 he joined Unity as part of the Machine Learning Team where he works out of Unity's office in Bellevue, WA.
Daniel Schambach has been working with Unity since 2008. He was a producer on a wide range of projects ranging from large scale interactive pieces to driving simulators for Jaguar Land Rover. He was a co-contributor of the GENIVI Vehicle Simulator and currently is a co-founder and product lead at Metamoto. His work has been exhibited at CES (2009-2012), The 2010 Shanghai World Expo, The London Science Museum and the British Motor Museum.
Christian Plagemann is the VP of Learning Products at Udacity; Udacity helps bring high-quality education and new employment opportunities to the world. Previously Christian, co-founded the Google VR team, the Daydream platform and worked on Physical Interaction research at Google — to make user interaction more direct, intuitive and enjoyable.
Before that, he worked on the Self-Driving Car at the Artificial Intelligence Lab of Stanford University and co-founded the 3D Vision Lab and Numovis Inc., a tech startup focused on motion tracking and computer vision for user interaction. Christian received his PhD in computer science from the Department of Computer Science of the Albert-Ludwigs-University Freiburg, Germany (Autonomous Intelligent Systems). Christian has a deep interest in the intersection of VR, simulation, and autonomous systems including robotics, self-driving cars, and drones/flying cars.
