Kurt Akeley - Biography

Biography

Kurt Akeley received a B.E.E. from the University of Delaware in 1980, and an M.S.E.E. from Stanford University in 1982. That year, he joined with Jim Clark in the founding team of Silicon Graphics, Incorporated (later renamed SGI).

Akeley developed the frame buffers and processor subsystems for the early IRIS series products and many of the CAD tools used to design these and other products. Akeley was instrumental in developing the graphics systems for the Power Series and Onyx systems, including the GTX, the VGX, and the RealityEngine. Akeley also led the design and documentation of the OpenGL graphics software specification, which is now supported by Silicon Graphics and many other workstation and personal computer vendors.

In 1984, Akeley's colleagues at Silicon Graphics recognized his contributions by selecting him as the first overall Spirit of SGI award winner. Akeley later became a chief engineer and then vice president at SGI.

After leaving SGI, Akeley resumed his studies at Stanford University in the Stanford Computer Graphics Lab researching 3D display technology and earned a PhD in electrical engineering in 2004. During this time, Akeley consulted at NVIDIA and collaborated on the design of the Cg hardware shading languages for GPUs. He was also the editor (i.e., the paper chair) for the SIGGRAPH 2000 conference proceedings and a principal researcher at Microsoft Research's Silicon Valley lab. He is currently the CTO of a Silicon Valley start-up, Lytro.