I just had a lovely morning teaching memo with Lio Wong at #COSMOS2025 in Tokyo! Charley and Wataru have put together an absolutely *fantastic* summer school. Fascinating talks, delightful people… and excellent location. I feel so lucky to be here. If you ever get a chance to attend COSMOS, take it!

Three years ago, at SIGGRAPH '22 in Vancouver, I took this picture of a pole casting two shadows: one blue and one yellow, from yellow and blue streetlamps respectively. Today, back in Vancouver for SIGGRAPH '25, I saw the same effect in sunlight! How can one sun cast two colored shadows? Hint in 🧵

While I was in Rotterdam for CogSci '24, I visited the Escher Museum and fell in love with his work all over again. Now, a year later, I'm delighted by this SIGGRAPH paper led by my friend Ana! (Say what you will about the technical details, you must admit that we came up with the ~perfect~ title.)

Thanks to a rogue Partiful RSVP form at #cogsci2025, I seem to have collected an unexpectedly large dataset (N=197) of whether cognitive scientists think the mind is composed of innate, domain-specialized modules…

I'm excited to give a ~mysterious new talk~ at this very special SIGGRAPH workshop on art & cognitive science! See you soon in Vancouver. :)

As always, CogSci has a fantastic lineup of workshops this year. An embarrassment of riches! Still deciding which to pick? If you are interested in building computational models of social cognition, I hope you consider joining @maxkw.bsky.social, @dae.bsky.social, and me for a crash course on memo!

If you're here at RLDM today, you are invited to check out this exciting workshop on social cognition organized by Joe Barnby and Amrita Lamba! I'm giving a talk on programming languages for theory-of-mind at 11:30. Here's the schedule: sites.google.com/view/rldm202... @rldmdublin2025.bsky.social

Here is a little inverse graphics puzzle: The no-parking sign on my side of Vassar Street casts its shadow in a dramatically different direction from the leafless tree on the far side of the street — almost 90º apart. How is that possible, given that the sun casts parallel rays? (Hints in thread.)

Last night, I realized that a workshop's submission portal only accepted plain text copy-pasted into a text box. Instead of manually de-TeX-ifying my beautifully-formatted PDF (5-minute job), I decided to work out how to do it automatically with pandoc (1-hour research project). Here's what I found…

Graphics has long studied how to make: (1) realistic images 📷 (2) non-photorealistic images ✍️ (3) realistic sounds 🎤 What about (4) "non-phono-realistic" sounds? What could that even mean? Next week at SIGGRAPH Asia, MIT undergrad Matt Caren will present our proposal… 🧵 arxiv.org/abs/2409.13507

Tinkering with "starter packs" on this website. Here is a starter pack for SIGGRAPH researchers and more broadly the graphics research community! 🫖 (If I missed you or someone you know, please leave me a message and I'll update the list as soon as I can!) go.bsky.app/9bXBV8A

Hi Bluesky! Crossposting the announcement of a new summer workshop on the emerging interface between cognitive science 🧠 and computer graphics 🫖 spearheaded by @kartikchandra.bsky.social! We're calling it: COGGRAPH! coggraph.github.io June – July 2024, free & open to all! 🧶

Hi friends— I'm packing for NeurIPS this morning and reflecting on how I find AI conferences to be daunting; overwhelming, even. It helps to have plans with friends! If you'd like to catch up next week, please send me an email. I would love to take a walk with you in New Orleans. :)

Last night in Cambridge I took these two pictures of the same tree. To me there is something almost overwhelmingly beautiful about how from picture one to two, the branches appear to wrap around the streetlight and make it a glinted wooden halo. (Why does this happen? The Fresnel effect, I think…)

One of the joys of studying visual perception is that you can't stop seeing "seeing" everywhere you go. Here I am on an American Airlines flight wondering if there are any T's hidden among those L's. (Figure from Bergen & Landy, 1991).

Hello, Bluesky! I am cautiously optimistic about you! (Sorry my background image has such a distinctly non-blue sky!)