Perry Kivolowitz

Perry Kivolowitz (born 1961) is an American computer scientist and business person. In 1985, he co-founded Advanced Systems Design Group which built hardware for the Commodore Amiga. This company was renamed Elastic Reality, Inc. and became well known as a digital imaging software provider. In 1995 this company sold to Avid Technology, Inc.

In 1996 he received an Academy Award for Scientific and Technical Achievement for the invention of shape-driven warping and morphing as exemplified in the Avid Elastic Reality package once in widespread use. Dr. Garth Dickie was a co-recipient of this award. The invention is noteworthy in that it provided a means of creating warping and morphing effects using an interface which was more optimized for the user rather than the computation. Previous methods were economical for computers to calculate but difficult for users to use. Most warping software today (such as those linked from the Wikipedia morphing page) are based on the shape-driven method.

Perry is a principal in SilhouetteFX LLC. He co-founded Profound Effects, Inc. (2001–2008), Hypercosm Inc. (1999–2001) and KSK Electrics, LLC (2013–present). Perry was accepted into the Visual Effects Society [1] in 2012.

Starting in 1997 Perry has had a continuing relationship with the Computer Sciences Department of the University of Wisconsin–Madison, first as an adjunct faculty member and more recently as Faculty Associate. Among the courses Mr. Kivolowitz teaches are the department's Introduction to Computer Graphics and Introduction to Operating Systems. During the University of Wisconsin - Madison's Sesquicentennial Celebration, Mr. Kivolowitz was honored as being one of the 150 Ways the University of Wisconsin has Touched the World.[2]

Perry lectured for AT&T and Bell Labs in the early 1980s on Unix Internals and debugging primarily at an AT&T facility in Piscataway New Jersey but also across the country. In April 2012, Perry resumed lecturing on the process of debugging[3]

As a graduate student Kivolowitz authored one of the earliest key logger programs, the source code of which was posted to Usenet in November 1983.[4] Mr. Kivolowitz authored an early paper on file systems for write-once media presented at the 1984 USENIX conference in Salt Lake City.[5]

As a co-founder of ASDG Incorporated (later Elastic Reality, Inc.) Kivolowitz invented the recoverable ram drive[6][7] In 1987, his concept for the SDP [8][9][10] (Satellite Disk Processor) predated the I2O movement by nine years.

Since 2004 Perry has been an invited speaker and provides expert testimony on the subject of detecting tampered digital images (both still images and video).

Published in 2013,[11] "Get Off My L@wn" is a novel in the zombie fiction genre. The book describes a technologist's unique approach to surviving zombie hordes.

In 2006, Mr. Kivolowitz wed Sara Krueger Kivolowitz.

Patents

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External links