Education
Kurt Akeley received a Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering from the University of Delaware in 1980, and an Master of Science in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University in 1982.
Kurt Akeley received a Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering from the University of Delaware in 1980, and an Master of Science in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University in 1982.
That year, he joined with Jim Clark in the founding team of Silicon Graphics, Incorporated (later renamed SGI). Akeley developed the frame buffers and processor subsystems for the early SGI Insurance Regulatory Information System series products and many of the Computer-aided Design tools used to design these and other products. Akeley was instrumental in developing the graphics systems for the Power Series and Onyx systems, including the GTX, the VGX, and the RealityEngine.
Akeley also led the design and documentation of the OpenGL graphics software specification, which was supported by Silicon Graphics and many other workstation and personal computer vendors.
Akeley later became a chief engineer and then vice president at SGI. After leaving SGI in 2001, Akeley resumed his studies at Stanford University in the Stanford Computer Graphics Laboratory researching 3D display technology and earned a Doctor of Philosophy in electrical engineering in 2004. During this time, Akeley consulted at NVIDIA and collaborated on the design of the Cg hardware shading languages for GPUs.
He was also the editor (ie, the paper chair) for the Special Interest Group on Graphics and Interactive Techniques 2000 conference proceedings and a principal researcher at Microsoft Research"s Silicon Valley laboratory In September 2010 he became the Chief Technology Officer of a Silicon Valley start-up, Lytro.