Jim Kajiya

About

Jim Kajiya is a pioneer in the field of computer graphics (opens in new tab). He is perhaps best known for the development of the rendering equation (opens in new tab).

Joining Microsoft Research as a senior researcher in 1994, Kajiya built and led the graphics group. He was the principal architect on Talisman, a low-cost hardware architecture for very high-quality real-time 3-D graphics. Kajiya also served as the principal investigator on a joint research project with IBM Corp. that produced an implementation of Prolog yielding a speed of 0.9 megalips and a new object-oriented systems programming language called FITH. In other work, he explored parallel ray tracing on the IBM RP3 and specified software architecture for scientific visualization in the IBM SVS, which became the Power Visualisation Station. In joint work with TRW, he served as architect for the FISC-1 and FISC-2 machines, supercomputers oriented toward military signal and image-processing tasks. He also developed a scientific programming language, FEX, suitable for compilation on vector and parallel supercomputers. He also worked on a language, nuBasic, intended to promote rich multimedia client applications.

He earned the title of Distinguished Engineer and became a director of research at Microsoft in 1997. His work has focused on very high-quality computer graphics. This work has included nonlinear anti-aliasing algorithms for the display of text on raster screens; invention of several new techniques for ray-tracing primitives such as swept volumes, parametric patches and fractal surfaces; an early paper on volume rendering; a hierarchical bounding box technique for accelerating ray tracing; the introduction of anisotropic light reflection models for surfaces; the introduction of algebraic geometry in patch computations; a new technique extending the ray-tracing process via an integral equation, or Monte Carlo algorithm, called the rendering equation; and a solution to the problem of rendering fuzzy surfaces.

He has published papers on mathematical models for computer vision, high-level programming languages and mathematical logic for computer science. Kajiya has served on the external advisory board of the Defense Mapping Agency (opens in new tab), on the National Neurocircuitry Database Committee for the National Academy of Sciences and Institute of Medicine (opens in new tab), and on the SIGGRAPH (opens in new tab) executive committee. He received the SIGGRAPH Technical Achievement Award (opens in new tab) in 1991 and served as the technical program chair for SIGGRAPH 93. In 1997, Kajiya, along with Dr. Timothy Kay, received an Academy Award (technical certificate) (opens in new tab) for work on rendering hair and fur.

Kajiya received his PhD from the University of Utah (opens in new tab) in 1979, was a professor at Caltech (opens in new tab) from 1979 through 1994.