Academy Award winner to have place in Utah Technology's Hall of Fame

Dinesh Patel won't be the only person inducted into the Utah Technology Council Hall of Fame in October.

He will be joined by Jim Kajiya, whose career has gone from hardware designer to Academy Award winner.

Kajiya worked for Quad Eight Electronics, where he designed automated mix-down equipment and time-code synchronizers, before joining Evans & Sutherland Computer Corp. as the project engineer for the first commercially available random access frame buffer.

Kajiya received his doctorate in computer science from the University of Utah and spent 15 years at the California Institute of Technology, working as an assistant and associate professor of computer science. Kajiya spent several years as the senior researcher at Microsoft Research and is currently a director of research at Microsoft. His recent work has focused on high-quality computer graphics, graphic hardware design and developing programming languages.

In 1991, he received the SIGGRAPH Technical Achievement Award, and in 1997, he and Timothy Kay won a Technical Achievement Award Oscar for their pioneering work in producing computer-generated fur and hair in motion pictures.

Kajiya has served on the external advisory board of the Defense Mapping Agency, the National Neurocircuitry Database Committee for the National Academy of Sciences and Institute of Medicine, as well as the SIGGRAPH executive committee.

The black-tie Hall of Fame induction event will take place Oct. 27 at the Little America Hotel, 500 S. Main. Details are available by e-mailing mark@utahtechcouncil.org.