Theodore Kim

Personal Website: https://tkim.graphics/

Theodore Kim received his B.S. from Cornell University and his M.S. and Ph.D. from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.  He is the author of the upcoming “Human” = White Human: Algorithmic Racism in Computer-Generated Cinema that examines how algorithms for white skin and straight hair came to be falsely seen as universal models for human depiction.

Before joining the faculty at Yale in 2019, he was a Senior Research Scientist at Pixar Animation Studios. He is a two-time Academy Award winner, once in 2012 for developing the Wavelet Turbulence algorithm that has appeared in dozens of blockbuster movies, and again in 2022 for his contributions to Pixar’s Fizt2 physics simulation system. He has won multiple Best Paper awards, and the NSF CAREER Award. His public writing has appeared in, among others, the Los Angeles Times, Scientific American, Time, San Francisco Chronicle, and Washington Post. He is an elected member of the Connecticut Academy of Science and Engineering.

At Yale, he is currently serving as the Director of Undergraduate Studies for Computer Science, and the co-director of the certificate in Computing, Culture & Society.  He teaches courses on computer science, computer graphics, as well as the history of computing and graphics.

A few articles:

“The Vietnamese Computer Scientist Who Made Toy Story Possible,” Time Magazine, May 16, 2024

“Global Routes and Hidden Labor in the American Mathematical Society’s Cold War Chinese Mathematics Translation Program,” Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences (2024) 54 (3): 291–334.

“AI Isn’t Magic. It’s Just Knowledge Sausage,” The Los Angeles Times, May 14, 2023

“Countering Racial Bias in Computer Graphics Research”, ACM SIGGRAPH Talks, 2022

“Racism in our curriculums isn’t limited to history. It’s in math, too,” The Washington Post, December 8, 2021

“The Racist Legacy of Computer-Generated Humans,” Scientific American, August 18, 2020