Ken Anjyo is an Executive R&D Advisor for OLM Digital, Principal Researcher of IMAGICA GROUP Advanced Research Group, and Adjunct Professor at Victoria University of Wellington.
Since 2000, he has also been leading R&D activities at OLM Digital, where credited as R&D supervisor for many Pokémon movies and several 3DCG films and TV series. Moreover, he has contributed to Japan’s digital media industry for many years, such as a technical committee member of the Computer Entertainment Supplier’s Association (CESA), the largest association of Japanese game companies, during 2009 – 2014. Also he’s been a board member of VFXJAPAN, the Visual Effects Society in the United States since 2011.
His research focuses on construction of mathematical and computationally tractable models, including “Tour into the Picture” (a predecessor of depth from-single-image methods), several SIGGRAPH and IEEE CG&A papers on art directable light and shade for 3D anime (TOG2021, TOG2007, CG&A2003 in the publication list), direct manipulation blendshapes for facial animation (CG&A2010), and early research in hair animation (SIGGARPH1992). He’s also active for collaboration with mathematicians, such as leading the Japanese government-sponsored project “Mathematics for Expressive Image Synthesis” (2010-2016), where CG researchers got chances to discuss CG research with pure mathematicians. The project provided such collaboration venues every year and published the proceedings from Springer (for symposia called “MEIS” in the publication list).
Prof. Anjyo has contributed to ACM SIGGRAPH over years, not only with paper/course presenters. He was assigned to the technical papers committees of SIGGRAPH or SIGGRAPH Asia several times. He also (co-)chaired several SIGGRAPH conferences, including SCA05, NPAR08, SIGGRAPH Asia 2009 Sketches and Posters program, SIGGRAPH Asia 2015 Courses program. He was a juror of the Computer Animation Festival of SIGGRAPH2014 and 2015. He is co-founder of ACM Digital Production Symposium (DigiPro) that started in 2012 as an ACM SIGGRAPH co-located event. He was also conference chair of SIGGRAPH Asia 2018.
He earned MS in mathematics and PhD. in information engineering. He’s been a VES (Visual Effects Society) member since 2011.