IIT Kharagpur alumni Parag Havaldar wins Oscar for technical achievement

IIT Kharagpur alumni Parag Havaldar is part of the Academy Awards’ list of winners for Technical achievement. The Indian-American has won the Oscar for the development of expression-based facial performance-capture technology at Sony Pictures Imageworks.

The list of 18 achievements was recently announced by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for its 2017 Scientific and Technical awards and Havaldar is part of the list.

“This pioneering system enabled large-scale use of animation rig-based facial performance-capture for motion pictures, combining solutions for tracking, stabilisation, solving and animator-controllable curve editing,” a release from the Academy said.

The awards will be handed out on February 11 in Beverly Hills, ahead of the main Oscar ceremony to held on February 26.

Havaldar had done his BTech in computer science and engineering in 1991 from IIT and went on to do a PhD in computer vision and graphics from the University of Southern California in 1996.

Currently he is a software supervisor at Sony Pictures Imageworks, where he leads the company’s proprietary efforts in the area of performance capture.

The technology developed by him and his group has been used to create stylised and realistic character animations in a variety of movies including “Alice in Wonderland”, “Monster House”, “Hancock” and “Spiderman”.