Creating Immersive Experiences with Digital Humans, Avatars, and AI

Eric Rachlin is a New Yorker, Computer Scientist and Entrepreneur. Eric received his Sc.B from Brown University in 2003 and his PhD in 2010. Post-PhD, Eric was a Senior Research Scientist in Michael Black's Department of Perceiving Systems at MPI-IS in Tübingen, Germany. While at MPI, Eric codeveloped software to accurately estimate human shape and pose from 3D scans, images and video. He commercialized this technology in 2013 as cofounder of Body Labs, which was acquired by Amazon in 2017. At Amazon Eric was Senior Manager of the Body Labs team and later a Principal Scientist. Eric left Amazon in 2021 and is now a corporate dropout pursuing a future startup.

Natalya Tatarchuk is a graphics engineer and a rendering enthusiast at heart, currently focusing on driving the state-of-the-art rendering technology, graphics performance and content creation in her role as a Distinguished Technical Fellow and Chief Architect, VP, Professional Artistry & Graphics Innovation at Unity. Prior to that, led the Graphics team at Unity, as VP of Graphics for the Unity Editor and Engine. Before that she was a AAA games developer, working on innovative cross-platform rendering engine and game graphics for Bungie’s Destiny franchise, as well the Halo series, such as Halo: ODST and Halo: Reach, and AMD Graphics Products Group where she pushed parallel computing boundaries investigating advanced real-time graphics techniques, and graphics hardware design and APIs. Natalya has been encouraging sharing in the games graphics community for several decades, largely by organizing a popular series of courses such as Advances in Real-time Rendering, Open Problems in Real-Time Rendering and Rendering Engine Architecture at SIGGRAPH, and convincing people to speak there. It seems to be working. Natalya is a member of multiple industry and hardware advisory boards. She holds an M.S. in Computer Science from Harvard University with a focus in Computer Graphics and B.A. degrees in Mathematics and Computer Science from Boston University.

Vivek Muppalla is the Director of Engineering at Scale AI, where he is working with Enterprises to enable Scale’s mission to democratize AI to help businesses see their full potential. Prior to Scale AI, Vivek was Director of Product and Engineering and an early member of Unity’s AI & Simulation business. At Unity, he solved some of the hardest challenges at the intersection of software engineering, 3D graphics, and machine learning enabling new applications for simulations in AI. He received his Master’s in Computer Science from the Georgia Institute of Technology.