Alec Rivers

I currently work at Shaper, a startup company I co-founded that has developed innovative digital control technology for handheld power tools. An overview of the technology can be found in a New York Times article and on the project web page.

In 2013 I was awarded a PhD in Computer Science by MIT, where from 2008 I was a member of the Computer Graphics Group advised by Prof. Frédo Durand. My thesis was on digital fabrication technologies. I have also conducted computer graphics research at Cornell University under Prof. Doug James, at the University of Tokyo under Professor Takeo Igarashi, at Tsinghua University under Professor Bin Wang, at UC Berkeley in the graphics group, at the New York University Media Research Lab and at Disney Research Los Angeles. I have also been a computer science teacher at Stuyvesant High School in New York City. My CV is available here.

I am interested in digital fabrication, computer vision, computer graphics, sketch-based modeling, non-photorealistic rendering, and physically-based animation. My PhD thesis was on augmented manual fabrication, and described approaches to deliver the benefits of both manual and digital fabrication by augmenting, rather than replacing, a human performing a manual fabrication task.