Morgan McGuire (on leave)

Position: Professor
Prounouns: he/him
Office: TPL 013
Phone: 413.597.4215
E-mail: [email protected]
Website: http://cs.williams.edu/~morgan

Education

  • Ph.D. Brown University 2006
  • M.S. Brown University 2002
  • M.Eng. MIT 2000
  • B.S. MIT 2000

Interests [Papers]

Computer graphics empowers visual communication through computation. Real-time 3D graphics is at the leading edge of power-efficient, high-performance computing. Together, high-performance computing and graphics profoundly affect modern life and culture, from personal cell phone apps to national-level storm forecasting. I work on:

  • Algorithms and hardware for high-performance computing
  • Interactive global illumination
  • Special effects for film and video games

Biography

Morgan McGuire is a professor of Computer Science at Williams College. He’s contributed to products including the Skylanders®, Call of Duty®, Marvel Ultimate Alliance®, and Titan Quest® series of video games series, the E Ink display used in the Amazon Kindle®, the PeakStream GPU computing architecture acquired by Google, and NVIDIA GPUs. Morgan has published papers on high-performance rendering and computational photography in SIGGRAPH, High Performance Graphics, the Eurographics Symposium on Rendering, Interactive 3D Graphics and Games, and Non-Photorealistic Animation and Rendering. He is a Visiting Professor at NVIDIA Research, the founding Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Computer Graphics Techniques, the project manager for the G3D Innovation Engine. He previously chaired the ACM SIGGRAPH Symposium on Interactive 3D Graphics and Games and the ACM SIGGRAPH Symposium on Non-Photorealistic Animation and Rendering. He is the author or coauthor of Computer Graphics: Principles & Practice 3rd Edition, The Graphics Codex, Creating Games: Mechanics, Content, and Technology, and chapters of several GPU Gems, ShaderX and GPU Pro volumes.

Research

Prof. McGuire’s current research is on hardware and software architectures for power-efficient high-performance computing. Modern computational solutions require tens of thousands of threads of execution to scale to large problems while minimizing latency and energy consumption. The complexity of such programs precludes explicit manual control of each element. New algorithms, programming languages, and scheduling methods address the complexity. These in turn motivate hardware architectures that are not only massively parallel, but that support scalable operating systems and algorithms. Prof. McGuire uses real-time 3D graphics as a representative application domain for these computing challenges. He previously worked on related topics in image processing and computational photography.

*Skylanders, Call of Duty, and Marvel Ultimate Alliance are  trademarks of Activision. Titan Quest is a trademark of THQ, Inc. Kindle is a trademark of Amazon.com, Inc