Marc Levoy

Professor,
jointly appointed in
Computer Science and
Electrical Engineering

Affiliations:: Computer Graphics Laboratory; Computer Systems Laboratory; Computer Science Department; Electrical Engineering Department; School of Engineering; Stanford University
Office:: Gates Computer Science Building
Room 366, Wing 3B; Stanford University; Stanford, CA 94305; Press here for directions.
Personal data:: Born in New York City; B. Architecture, Cornell, 1976; M.S. in Architecture, Cornell, 1978; PhD in Computer Science, Univ. North Carolina, 1989

Office hours:: Winter 2009: Tue/Thu, 11:00am - 12:15; Spring 2009: Tue/Thu, 4:15pm - 5:30
Phone:: (650) 725-4089; (650) 723-0033 (fax)
Email (the best way to reach me):
Web address:: http://graphics.stanford.edu/~levoy/
Administrative assistant:: Melissa Rivera; (650) 724-6865; melissa@graphics.stanford.edu

Biographical sketch

Marc Levoy is a Professor of Computer Science and (jointly) Electrical Engineering at Stanford University. He received a Bachelor's and Master's in Architecture from Cornell University in 1976 and 1978, and a PhD in Computer Science from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1989. In the 1970's Levoy worked on computer animation, developing an early computer-assisted cartoon animation system. This system was used by Hanna-Barbera Productions from 1983 until 1996 to produce The Flintstones, Scooby Doo, and other shows. In the 1980's Levoy worked on volume rendering, a family of techniques for displaying sampled three-dimensional functions, for example computed tomography (CT) or magnetic resonance (MR) data. In the 1990's he worked on technology and algorithms for digitizing three-dimensional objects. This led to the Digital Michelangelo Project, in which he and a team of researchers spent a year in Italy digitizing the statues of Michelangelo using laser scanners. His current interests include light field sensing and display, optical microscopy, and computational photography - which refers broadly to computational imaging techniques that extend the capabilities of digital photography. Awards: Charles Goodwin Sands Medal for best undergraduate thesis (1976), National Science Foundation Presidential Young Investigator (1991), ACM SIGGRAPH Computer Graphics Achievement Award (1996), ACM Fellow (2007).

Details about the Sands Medal and my work in cartoon animation.
Citation for the Computer Graphics Achievement Award.
Curriculum vita (PDF, no links to papers).

Professional stuff

List of publications (with pictures, abstracts, and links to papers)

Summary of my current research (text-only, with links)

Current and recent teaching

Slide sets (mine and others)
Links to all of our lab's research projects
Links to our lab's technical publications
The people in our laboratory

Personal stuff:

Louis Fabian Bachrach's nice 1997 photographs of me (here and here) for the Computer Museum in Boston (now closed),
I do occasionally wear something besides blue dress shirts. Here are shots with other shirts, from August 2001 and July 2003.
Yes, that's a Death Ride T-shirt in the third shot. I also rode in 2005, and yes, I finished all 5 passes - 15,000 feet of climbing. That's why I'm smiling in this official ride photograph, taken at the top of Carson Pass after 12 hours of cycling.
Some group photos with colleagues and students
A small collection of digital and computational photographs I've taken.
Photographic essays about personal aspects of my 1998-99 sabbatical in Italy
During my year abroad, I learned to carve in marble.
Sculptures by my mother, who unlike me has real talent.
I've been measuring and rendering 3D objects for a long time.
Here are some drawings I made in college for the Historic American Buildings Survey.
I still like finding and measuring old objects, especially if it involves getting dirty.
This photographic essay describes a week I spent on an archaeological dig in the Roman Forum.
My favorite interview, by Noah Adams of National Public Radio's All Things Considered - about Michelangelo's David (June 13, 2000).
(Click to hear the interview using RealAudio at 14.4Kbs or 28.8Kbs, or as a .wav file.)
This one by Guy Raz, weekend host of All Things Considered, runs a close second. It's about the Frankencamera (October 11, 2009).
(Click here for NPR's web page containing the story and pictures, and here for a direct link to the audio as an .mp3 file)
Finally, here's a text-only interview at SIGGRAPH 2003, by Wendy Ju, with reminiscences of my early mentors in computer graphics.
I also liked the cover of the Siggraph 2001 proceedings. The image is from a paper (in the proceedings) on subsurface scattering, co-authored with Henrik Wann Jensen, Steve Marschner, and Pat Hanrahan. And check out this milk. Or this large version. This paper won an Academy Award in 2004.
However, not everything went smoothly at Siggraph 2001. A more-strenuous-than-expected after-Siggraph hike inspired Pat Hanrahan's and my students to create this humorous movie poster. Click here for the innocent version of this story. And here for the real story.
A lot of my research relates to volume data. The cause may be genetic. My mother's cousin, David Chesler is credited with the first demonstration of filtered backprojection, the dominant method used in computed tomography (CT) and positron emission tomography (PET) for combining multiple projections to yield 3D medical data. Here is a description of his contributions.
My father's genes also seem to be guiding my research tastes. Optics has been in my family for four generations. My father Barton Monroe Levoy and my grandfather Monroe Benjamin Levoy were opticians and sellers of eyeglasses (Tura). My great-grandfather Benjamin Monroe Levoy sold cameras, microscopes, and other optical instruments in New York City a century ago. Here is a piece of stationary from his store. This specimen of a silkworm mouth, believed to be from one of his microscope slide collections, appears in our SIGGRAPH 2006 paper on light field microscopy.
My great-grandfather apparently also sold binoculars from his store. This pair, made by Jena Glass about 100 years ago and inscribed with the name B.M. Levoy, New York, was recovered by a SWAT team during a drug raid in South Florida in 2008. They have undoubtedly passed through many hands during their long and storied life; it would be fascinating to watch a video of everything these lenses have seen.