Tackling Latency in Interactive Generative AI

Please join us for the Orange County ACM Chapter's bi-monthly evening program series.

Tackling Latency in Interactive Generative AI

Agenda
6:30 PM Doors Open & Networking
7:00 PM Announcements, Presentation, and Q&A
8:30 PM Meeting Adjourned

Event Details
Highlighting breakthroughs from his recently completed tenure as a professor of interactive graphics, this presentation delivers impactful research results addressing the systemic hurdles of low-latency remote interaction, through the grand challenge of achieving synchronous avatar dancing online. Serving as the consortium research lead for the EU CAROUSEL Pathfinder project, Kenny directed a pan-European team of 50 researchers and artists to transform generative AI from a stop-start wait cycle utility into a fully interactive immersive medium.

A core of this effort is DanceGraph, an open sourced, high-performance engine engineered to enable synchronized movement and drive full-body, conversational AI avatars without perceptible network lag. By utilizing immersive, real-time dance as the ultimate stress test for system constraints, this research directly challenges the limitations of full-body interaction with no network lag, through new AI transformer methods for predictive synchronization.

Beyond the technical algorithms and architecture, this talk explores the profound wider inspirations for digital presence and the metaverse enabled by the emergence of interactive generative AI. The session unpacks the practical milestones that are dismantling barriers to natural collaboration, paving the way for next-generation creative tools where artists can co-create live with AI. Finally, the presentation maps future avenues for spatial computing and media generation, culminating in a showcase of inspiring rapid previz experiments that demonstrate how these interactive innovations are actively reshaping content creation pipelines.

Speaker
Kenny Mitchell is a senior engineer at Walt Disney Animation Studios engaged in an undisclosed project for the information services team within production technology. He is an outstanding scientist and practitioner in the creative industries with a career spanning 4 decades of games, graphics, robotics, and computer vision.

Recently for Roblox, he led the visual Metaverse to a ~$40Bn valuation with 70m+ DAUs as lead of the rendering features team developing real-time photorealism at a massive scale as a strategic company investment. As a Disney Imagineer, he historically founded Disney Research in the UK and assisted Star Wars digital acting research with Industrial Light and Magic London, and prior to that lead video game engine developments for Electronic Arts with game franchises including Harry Potter, Monopoly and Steven Spielberg's BAFTA award winning Boom Blox. Most recently he is credited on the all-time top grossing motion picture animation Zootopia 2 (BAFTA nominated).

As a professor of video games technology with Edinburgh Napier University 2012-2026 he led consortium research for the prestigious European funded future emerging technology proactive pathfinder project on low-latency online dance interaction called, CAROUSEL, EU rated 'exceptional/excellent'. He co-founded 3Finery Ltd, for a new way to help people be together and play through eXtended reality and generative AI conversational agents. As CTO of Cobra Simulation Ltd, he introduced a new optimized representation of generative AI graphics called VoxSpars in CobraWorld digital twins (beyond NERFs, Gaussian Splatting, etc).

For the Association of Computing Machinery, launched ACM GAMES: Research and Practice journal and magazine as editor-in-chief, he was associate editor of the ACM Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques journal (PACMCGIT). He is an ACM Distinguished Speaker and a frequent advisor to ACM SIGGRAPH. He has also been associate editor of Elsevier Computers and Graphics journal and served on many program committees. He has a wealth of recognized excellence in globally high-income commercial delivery across the top levels of technology for games, movie visual effects, consumer products and Themepark attractions. Kenny holds around 50 patents and has published over 100 technical papers. He graduated with an honors degree in CS and AI from Edinburgh University. A dual UK and USA citizen based in California, he is owner of a creative center, titled 'Creative Cridhe' (pr. Cree, Scots Gaelic for ‘Heart’) at Loaningdale, Biggar, UK.

Co-sponsors
This event is co-sponsored by the IEEE Orange County Computer Society, SIGAI OC, and the IEEE OC Solid-State Circuit Society (SSCS).

Venue & Parking
This meeting will be held at the Knobbe Martens' Irvine offices. Parking validation will be provided to attendees.