Mark Leone Email & Phone Number

Santa Clara, CA, US

Miramar, Wellington, NZ

• Led development on the Manuka renderer, which employs a novel architecture that permits very high quality shading without sacrificing fast path tracing.
• Head of Rendering department, responsible for project management, stakeholderengagement, long-term planning, and production support management.
• Our team contributed to over 30 movies at Weta Digital, including War for the Planet of the Apes, which was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Visual Effects.
• Manuka is the core technology behind the Avatar: Flight of Passage attraction at Walt Disney World.
• Transactions on Graphics paper: Manuka: A Batch-Shading Architecture for Spectral Path Tracing in Movie Production.

Miramar, Wellington, NZ

• Developed the Manuka shading system, including an advanced compiler that generates native code from RSL using a unique batch-oriented code generator that ensures high texture and memory locality.
• Built a RenderMan-compliant front end for the renderer, including RIB parser, rendering and plugin APIs, and hierarchical graphics state.
• Shared leadership responsibilities, including project management.

Santa Clara, California, US

• Led development of SLX, the shading language for native rendering on Intel’s Larrabee platform.
• Implemented major compiler components, including parser, typechecker, and code generator.
• Leveraged LLVM compiler toolkit for analysis and optimization.
• Led a small compiler engineering team using Agile methodologies. Defined milestones, managed estimation and sprint planning, tracked bugs and feature requests, and led testing and documentation efforts.

Emeryville, California, US

• Lead developer of RenderMan shading system.– Developed advanced shading language features, including shader objects and co-shaders.– Redesigned shading system for multi-threaded execution.– Achieved significant.
• Developed next-generation shading language for Grail renderer.– Designed object-oriented shading framework with inheritance, virtual methods, etc.– Implemented compiler front-end and intermediate infrastructure.–.

• Developed compiler and run-time system for AI-driven, personality-rich animated characters
• Language features: fine-grained multithreading, RETE-based production system, backtracking, execution lookahead (for animation blending).

Bloomington, Indiana, US

NSF Grant CCR-97-11269, A Staged Compiler Architecture for Dynamic Program Optimization, with R. Kent Dybvig.

Pasadena, CA, US

I built ground support software for the Mars Observer spacecraft, including a novel testing framework (SITS).

Ms, Computer Science

Bs, Computer Science