Christopher Root Email & Phone Number

Palo Alto, California, Us

Software engineering manager for a web-graphics team. I lead the engineering and product development of a global customer-facing, web mixed-reality design application, oversee front-end quality initiatives, drive product metrics and telemetry, and support application roll-out to worldwide markets.

San Francisco, Ca, Us

Leading and managing a team of 3/4 highly experienced graphics engineers to expand on the 1st generation custom render engine to be more extensible and adaptable to changing visualization requirements. This included a redesign of low-level code foundations to align with more modern render APIs such as Vulkan.Built, implemented, and maintains an end-to-end functional test suite to enable easy test writing across the growing requirements and configurations of the system integral to the stability of the software.Continues to improve the design and architecture of a multi-faceted, full-stack data analytics system in order to be flexible and scalable to increasing loads impacting concurrency, performance, and stability.

San Francisco, Ca, Us

Responsible for the design and implementation of a multi-GPU server-side rendering engine used to produce data visualizations of multi-billion row datasets stored in a GPU-accelerated SQL database, written in C/C++, OpenGL 4.6, and Cuda.Renderer supports 2D primitives such as point, lines, polygons, and sprites, and can optionally render accumulation effects such as density heatmaps.GL shaders are dynamically written at runtime to allow SQL query results to drive render properties.Visualizations of multi-billion row datasets can be rendered in milliseconds, near real-time with client-side interactive feedback.Supports multi-gpu and multi-node (distributed) server configurations via a compositor design to scale to high-volume datasets.Responsible for many full-stack features to ensure backend interfaces and payloads are used effectively to create various dashboard chart visualizations, including high-resolution pointmaps, choropleths, and heatmaps.

New York, Ny, Us

Responsible for the redevelopment of a client-side rendering engine to drive 2D & 3D visualizations for mobile, web, and Bloomberg Terminal applications (written in JavaScript). Aided in the design and implementation of an entity-based game engine to drive data visualizations for a range of applications. Implemented a vector graphics rendering engine in WebGL for filling and stroking 2D lines and curves. Supports polylines, arcs, & quadratic/cubic bezier curve splines. Also designed and implemented a 3D rendering framework using WebGL which included an API to create custom meshes withper-vertex colors and normals, wireframe shading modes, Autodesk Maya-like interactive camera controls, and pixel-based hit-testing for mouse interactions. Also supports line drawing with widths and line joins.

San Francisco, Ca, Us

Produced and directed particle, smoke, and fluid simulations for award-winning film productions. Credits include: Star Trek Into Darkness (2013), The Avengers (2012), Battleship (2012), Transformers Dark of the Moon (2011), & Rango (2011).Designed particle effects templates for elements such as sparks, explosions, debris, and space nebula which were utilized for quick turnarounds of shots under tight deadlinesTrained and mentored new artists with ILM's proprietary particle effects system in both SF and Singapore offices.

San Francisco, Ca, Us

Responsible for several enhancements to the hair/feather generation that dramatically improved artist productivity for the Academy-Award winning film Rango (2011).Accelerated character renders on the film Rango (2011) up to 10x with the development of a GPU-based hair occlusion rendering technique. Enhanced existing particle tools to preview and style hair/feathers in near real-time markedly improving artist productivity.

San Francisco, Ca, Us

Created several valuable Python-based production tools for managing and monitoring the render farm system. Included client/server communication protocols allowing artists to track the progress of their render jobs on demand with an improved user-friendly interface.

College Station, Tx, Us

Provided research and development support for new data visualization methodologies. Topics included Reaction-diffusion texture synthesis and exploring how particle movement across surfaces aids in the perception of 3D shape. Also graded papers, conducted office hours and maintained web sites for graduate-level computer graphics programming courses.

Emeryville, California, Us

Engineered Maya plugins to automate 3D model checkins and to improve application of bend deformations in the pipeline.Assisted in set dressing and rigging for the Academy Award-winning film Ratatouille (2007).

Us

Implemented performance features for the ‘03 release of Aphelion, an LDAP database designed for 25+ million entries.Provided debugging and problem solving support for national clientele including AT&T Wireless & Unilever.

Master Of Science (M.S.), Visualization Sciences

Bachelor Of Science (B.S.), Computer Science