paul debevec is a researcher in computer graphics at the university of southern californias institute for creative technologies he is best known for his work in finding capturing and synthesizing the bsdf utilizing the light stages his research team constructed to find and capture the reflectance field over the human face high dynamic range imaging and imagebased modeling and renderingdebevec received his undergraduate degree in mathematics and engineering from the university of michigan and a phd in computer science from university of california berkeley in 1996 his thesis research was in photogrammetry or the recovery of the 3d shape of an object from a collection of still photographs taken from various angles in 1997 he and a team of students produced the campanile movie 1997 a virtual flyby of uc berkeleys campanile tower debevecs more recent research has included methods for recording realworld illumination for use in computer graphics a number of novel inventions for recording ambient and incident light have resulted from the work of debevec and his team including the light stage of which five or more versions have been constructed each an evolutionary improvement over the previoustechniques based on debevecs work have been used in several major motion pictures including the matrix 1999 matrix reloaded and matrix revolutions 2003 spiderman 2 2004 king kong 2005 superman returns 2006 spiderman 3 2007 and avatar 2009in addition debevec and his team produced several short films that have premiered at siggraphs annual electronic theater including fiat lux 1999 and the parthenon 2004debevec along with tim hawkins john monos and mark sagar was awarded a 2009 scientific and engineering award from the academy of motion picture arts and sciences for the design and engineering of the light stage capture devices and the imagebased facial rendering system developed for character relighting in motion picturesin 2002 he was named to the mit technology review tr100 as one of the top 100 innovators in the world under the age of 35some of his later work he presented to the siggraph convention in 2008 and 2013 digital emily in association with image metrics and digital ira in association with activision respectively digital emily shown in 2008 was a precomputed simulation meanwhile digital ira run in realtime in 2013 and is fairly realistic looking even in realtime animation