Biography
Professor Kenny Mitchell is a senior at Walt Disney Animation Studios and chair of Video Game Technology at Edinburgh Napier University (ENU) researching and delivering impactful practical technology solutions for video games, Disney movie productions, theme parks, and immersive media. With exceeding expectations rating, he recently completed a key role as consortium research lead for the European Pathfinder project, called CAROUSEL – AI for Enhanced Social Interaction, and is currently developing bids for following funding and investment to go to market with a new ENU spinout formed upon the DanceGraph patent pending technology that he co-invented with colleagues at Napier. Before this, he led as the ENU principal investigator for the international doctoral training network project called, DISTRO, and is co-founder of a fully completed Napier spinout (3Finery Ltd) with his student and Marie Curie Fellow, Dr Llogari Casas, delivering patented seamless appearance for augmented reality communications.
For Professor Mitchell’s PhD, he introduced real-time 3D graphics for information visualization on consumer hardware. Historically, over the past 20 years he founded a Disney Research Lab in Edinburgh and shipped video game visual advancements for Roblox, Disney and Electronic Arts with groundbreaking high-end graphics technologies including voxels, volumetric light scattering, motion blur, light field, conversational AI, generative AI, and animation methods. Whilst leading technology into movie franchise video games including Harry Potter, the BAFTA award winning Boom Blox with Stephen Spielberg, Star Wars augmented reality photos, and image quality for animation (Finding Dory) & live action (Pirates of the Caribbean) films, he currently holds over 50 patent inventions.
He has built and managed large diverse research groups, and media technology projects with international consortia of up to 24 companies/universities.
He is currently Associate Editor of Elsevier Computers and Graphics and ACM Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques, and is a nominated election candidate for ACM SIGGRAPH Executive Committee in the Director at Large role, having served on the SIGGRAPH Conference Advisory Committee for prior years. He has also served on the advisory board of InGAME and as co-editor-in-chief of ACM Games. He is past chair of ACM SIGGRAPH I3D, CVMP and VRCAI conferences, and has served on the EPSRC strategic advisory network including the UK Digital Economy Impact Review, USA NSF scoping in immersive technologies, the Scottish Digital Media Leadership group and is currently contributing to the Scottish Games Network - Cross Party Group Action Plan. He maintains memberships as an ACM Pioneer and Distinguished Speaker, an award-winning BAFTA member, and the IEEE Computer Society as a Senior member.
Profile links: https://www.mobygames.com/person/43106/kenny-mitchell/, https://www.imdb.com/name/nm7376664/, Personal Page: https://farpeek.com
Professor Mitchell's has past research supervisions for Dr Simon Pilgrim (EA/UCL), Dr Babis Koniaris (Disney/Bath), Nick Swafford - MPhil (Disney/Bath), Dr Gwyneth Bradbury (Disney/UCL), Dr Dan Calian (Disney/UCL), Isadora Sanna - MSc (Disney/Bath), Dr Llogari Casas Cambra (Disney/ENU), Dr Angeliki Glynou (ENU), Dr Caio Brito (Disney/U Montreal/UFPE), David Sinclair - MSc (Edinburgh University), and current ENU PhD students, Steven McSeveney, Adeyemi Ademola, and Lewis Watson (ENU).