Presentation
SIGGRAPH 2025 | NVIDIA Research Special Address: Sanja Fidler, Aaron Lefohn, Ming-Yu Liu
DescriptionJoin us for the special address with NVIDIA Research leaders Sanja Fidler, Aaron Lefohn, and Ming-Yu Liu as they chart the next frontier of graphics and simulation.
Today, AI is transforming computer graphics — and computer graphics are driving the next generation of AI.
Sanja, Aaron, and Ming-Yu will showcase the latest breakthroughs in computer graphics technologies, from neural rendering and materials to world foundation models. Plus, explore the new opportunities and applications these capabilities are unlocking across media, automotive, manufacturing, and robotics.
About the Speakers
Sanja Fidler is vice president of AI research at NVIDIA, leading the company’s Spatial Intelligence Lab. She is also an associate professor at the University of Toronto, and an affiliate faculty member at the Vector Institute, which she co-founded. Fidler co-authored over 130 scientific papers in the fields of computer vision, machine learning and NLP. She has served as Area Chair for a variety of conferences, including the Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), International Conference in Computer Vision (ICCV), the Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP), the International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), the Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS), and SIGGRAPH.
Fidler has received the NVIDIA Pioneer of AI Award, Amazon Academic Research Award, Facebook Faculty Award, Early Researcher Award, University of Toronto’s Innovation Award, and the Connaught New Researcher Award. In 2018, she was appointed as the Canadian CIFAR AI Chair. She has also been ranked among the top three most influential AI female researchers in Canada by Re-WORK, was named in Globe and Mail’s Changemakers in 2025, and was listed in the top people in AI in 2023 by the Business Insider. With her co-workers, she received the Best Paper Honorable Mention award at CVPR’17, SIGGRAPH 2023, and Best Paper Award at SIGGRAPH Asia 2023. Her main research interests are in spatial intelligence: 3D content creation, spatial understanding, and simulation for robotics.
Aaron Lefohn is vice president of graphics research at NVIDIA, overseeing teams focused on rendering, AI graphics, and graphics systems. His teams’ inventions have played key roles in bringing path tracing to real-time graphics and pioneering real-time AI computer graphics. Recent NVIDIA products derived from his teams’ inventions include DLSS, RTX Path Tracing, RTX Dynamic Illumination, Neural Shading, the Slang shading language, and more.
Aaron has led real-time rendering and graphics programming model research teams for over 15 years and has productized many inventions into games, professional graphics software, GPU hardware, and GPU graphics APIs.
Aaron holds a Ph.D. in computer science from UC Davis and an M.S. in computer science from the University of Utah.
Ming-Yu Liu is a vice president of research at NVIDIA and a fellow of IEEE. He leads the Deep Imagination Research group at NVIDIA, which currently focuses on Generative AI for Physical AI. His research team has helped create several new product categories for NVIDIA, including NVIDIA Cosmos, a developer-first world foundation model platform for Physical AI; NVIDIA Edify, a family of Generative AI models that powers Getty Images and Shutterstock’s GenAI services; NVIDIA Canvas [GauGAN], a real-time painting tool that uses GANs to turn simple brushstrokes into photorealistic images; and NVIDIA Maxine [LivePortrait], an AI-first cloud-native video streaming platform. His research group publishes scientific papers in top-tier AI conferences regularly, including NeurIPS, ICLR, ICML, CVPR, ICCV, ECCV, and SIGGRAPH. Several of their papers have received prestigious awards.
Today, AI is transforming computer graphics — and computer graphics are driving the next generation of AI.
Sanja, Aaron, and Ming-Yu will showcase the latest breakthroughs in computer graphics technologies, from neural rendering and materials to world foundation models. Plus, explore the new opportunities and applications these capabilities are unlocking across media, automotive, manufacturing, and robotics.
About the Speakers
Sanja Fidler is vice president of AI research at NVIDIA, leading the company’s Spatial Intelligence Lab. She is also an associate professor at the University of Toronto, and an affiliate faculty member at the Vector Institute, which she co-founded. Fidler co-authored over 130 scientific papers in the fields of computer vision, machine learning and NLP. She has served as Area Chair for a variety of conferences, including the Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), International Conference in Computer Vision (ICCV), the Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP), the International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), the Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS), and SIGGRAPH.
Fidler has received the NVIDIA Pioneer of AI Award, Amazon Academic Research Award, Facebook Faculty Award, Early Researcher Award, University of Toronto’s Innovation Award, and the Connaught New Researcher Award. In 2018, she was appointed as the Canadian CIFAR AI Chair. She has also been ranked among the top three most influential AI female researchers in Canada by Re-WORK, was named in Globe and Mail’s Changemakers in 2025, and was listed in the top people in AI in 2023 by the Business Insider. With her co-workers, she received the Best Paper Honorable Mention award at CVPR’17, SIGGRAPH 2023, and Best Paper Award at SIGGRAPH Asia 2023. Her main research interests are in spatial intelligence: 3D content creation, spatial understanding, and simulation for robotics.
Aaron Lefohn is vice president of graphics research at NVIDIA, overseeing teams focused on rendering, AI graphics, and graphics systems. His teams’ inventions have played key roles in bringing path tracing to real-time graphics and pioneering real-time AI computer graphics. Recent NVIDIA products derived from his teams’ inventions include DLSS, RTX Path Tracing, RTX Dynamic Illumination, Neural Shading, the Slang shading language, and more.
Aaron has led real-time rendering and graphics programming model research teams for over 15 years and has productized many inventions into games, professional graphics software, GPU hardware, and GPU graphics APIs.
Aaron holds a Ph.D. in computer science from UC Davis and an M.S. in computer science from the University of Utah.
Ming-Yu Liu is a vice president of research at NVIDIA and a fellow of IEEE. He leads the Deep Imagination Research group at NVIDIA, which currently focuses on Generative AI for Physical AI. His research team has helped create several new product categories for NVIDIA, including NVIDIA Cosmos, a developer-first world foundation model platform for Physical AI; NVIDIA Edify, a family of Generative AI models that powers Getty Images and Shutterstock’s GenAI services; NVIDIA Canvas [GauGAN], a real-time painting tool that uses GANs to turn simple brushstrokes into photorealistic images; and NVIDIA Maxine [LivePortrait], an AI-first cloud-native video streaming platform. His research group publishes scientific papers in top-tier AI conferences regularly, including NeurIPS, ICLR, ICML, CVPR, ICCV, ECCV, and SIGGRAPH. Several of their papers have received prestigious awards.
Event Type
Keynote Speaker
TimeMonday, 11 August 20254:00pm - 5:00pm PDT
LocationWest Building, Ballroom AB
Livestreamed
Recorded
