James F. O'Brien


James F. O'Brien is a computer graphics researcher and professor of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering at the University of California, Berkeley.
He is also co-founder and chief science officer at Avametric, a company developing software for virtual clothing try on.
In 2015, he received an award for Scientific and Technical Achievement from
Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences.

Education

Dr. O'Brien received a Bachelor of Science in 1992 from Florida International University. He then did his graduate work under the supervision of Dr. Jessica Hodgins at Georgia Tech's GVU Center. He received his doctorate in Computer Science from the Georgia Institute of Technology College of Computing in 2000 for a thesis entitled Graphical Modeling and Animation of Fracture.

Berkeley

He joined UC Berkeley's Computer Science department as a faculty member in 2000. Prof. O'Brien runs the Berkeley Computer Animation and Modeling Group and his research focuses primarily on physically based animation, 3D modeling, and audio simulation.

Awards

Prof. O'Brien has published an extensive collection of research papers on topics such as surface reconstruction, human figure animation, mesh generation, physically based animation, surgical simulation, computational fluid dynamics, and fracture propagation.
Prof. O'Brien served as a consultant on the development of the game physics engine Digital Molecular Matter. To date, this game engine has been used in and an off-line version of it was used for special effects in the film Avatar, Sucker Punch, Source Code, and " and more than 60 other feature films'.
In 2015, his work on developing DMM was recognized by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences with a Technical Achievement award. The citation reads:
"To Ben Cole for the design of the Kali Destruction System, to Eric Parker for the development of the Digital Molecular Matter toolkit, and to James O’Brien for his influential research on the finite element methods that served as a foundation for these tools. The combined innovations in Kali and DMM provide artists with an intuitive, art-directable system for the creation of scalable and realistic fracture and deformation simulations. These tools established finite element methods as a new reference point for believable on-screen destruction.''"