Keith Waters (born 1962, England), formerly of LifeFX Networks, Inc., has been involved in facial animation for the past 20 years. He development of a muscle-based model for facial animation including a physically based skin tissue model as well as a visual text-to-speech system called DECface. He is co-author of "Computer Facial Animation", a guide to facial animation the first edition published in 1995 and a second edition in 2008.
Keith Waters was born in Kent, England. He received his Ph. D from Middlesex University (UK) in 1988. He is currently the director of engineering device software at Nexage and prior to that a principal architect at Akamai Technologies Inc., and previously a Director of Research at Orange Labs Boston MA, USA. Keith has been active in Human Computer Interaction (HCI) and has published scientific papers on novel applications. He has been engaged with the W3C is the development of Web standards for mobile web technologies.
After graduating from the Centre for Advanced Studies in Computer Aided Art and Design (now the Lansdown Centre for Electronic Arts) at Middlesex University in 1988 with a Ph. D in computer graphics, Keith worked for Schlumberger in Palo Alto and then at their Research Lab for Computer Science Austin Texas where he worked on parallel CM-2 data visualization. In 1991 he joined Digital Equipment's Cambridge Research Lab in Boston MA where he continued to work on user interfaces including DECface the visual equivalent of DECtalk the text-to-speech engine. Later, he went on to create the FaceWorks product that was used at Comdex. While at Compaq he invented a variety of user interfaces including the first Smart Kiosk, the invisible mouse and image-based touchscreen. After a brief time at LifeF/X he worked on film and television high-performance face animation techniques into Web-based technology, he joined Orange in 2001 where he was a senior expert in mobile services developing next-generation mobile Web technologies for high performance open source devices. Most recently he was a principal architect at Akamai Technologies Inc., assisting them with their mobile strategy.