Published on University of Toronto's Research and Innovation webpage

Karan Singh is a Professor in the Department of Computer Science and co-director of the Dynamic Graphics Project Lab. Professor Singh’s research in interactive computer graphics has had profound impact beyond academia, in the graphics industry and creative community, through commercial software tools, start-ups, and animated films.

His contributions include Academy Award winning industry software for animation, Maya (Technical Oscar 2003), and reverse engineering, Paraform. He was the Software R&D Director for the 2004 Oscar winning animation film Ryan, and has contributed significantly to other award winning animations. He has co-founded a number of start-ups including Sketch-2, software for real estate planning and leasing (now FindSpace); MeshMixer, design software for 3D printing (acquired by Autodesk in 2011); Flatfab, software for rapid prototyping using laser-cutters (University of Toronto Inventor of the Year Award 2015); and most recently JALI Inc., tools for expressive facial animation, and JanusVR, an immersive web browsing platform for AR/VR and immersive web community with over 150,000 users. MeshMixer, Flatfab and JanusVR are free, open source software, benefiting the 3D printing and laser-cutting maker community of creative professionals, and immersive web experience community respectively. These pieces of software have active user bases and have been downloaded hundreds of thousands of times worldwide. The research behind Professor Singh’s creative software tools is highly innovative, having been published at the very top venues in Computer Graphics and Human Computer Interaction, and protected by numerous patents.