Jason Lawrence

I am an engineering director at Google. I co-founded and currently lead the research and engineering team behind Google Beam (formerly Project Starline). Google Beam is a new real-time communication and device platform that is changing the way we connect with people across distance.

Prior to Google, I was associate professor of computer science at the University of Virginia. I received a PhD in computer science from Princeton University and a BS in electrical engineering from Carnegie Mellon University.

My career has spanned academic research, applied research, and building organizations and products from the ground up. For more, see my LinkedIn page and Google Scholar profile.

selected publications

SIGGRAPH
Project Starline: A high-fidelity telepresence system

Lawrence, J., Goldman, D. B, Achar, S., Blascovich, G. M., Desloge, J. G., Fortes, T., Gomez, E. M., Häberling, S., Hoppe, H., Huibers, A., Knaus, C., Kuschak, B., Martin-Brualla, R., Nover, H., Russell, A. I., Seitz, S. M., and Tong, K.

ACM Transactions on Graphics (Proc. of SIGGRAPH Asia) 40(6), 2021.

Abs BibTeX

We present a real-time bidirectional communication system that lets two people, separated by distance, experience a face-to-face conversation as if they were copresent. It is the first telepresence system that is demonstrably better than 2D videoconferencing, as measured using participant ratings (e.g., presence, attentiveness, reaction-gauging, engagement), meeting recall, and observed nonverbal behaviors (e.g., head nods, eyebrow movements). This milestone is reached by maximizing audiovisual fidelity and the sense of copresence in all design elements, including physical layout, lighting, face tracking, multi-view capture, microphone array, multi-stream compression, loudspeaker output, and lenticular display. Our system achieves key 3D audiovisual cues (stereopsis, motion parallax, and spatialized audio) and enables the full range of communication cues (eye contact, hand gestures, and body language), yet does not require special glasses or body-worn microphones/headphones. The system consists of a head-tracked autostereoscopic display, high-resolution 3D capture and rendering subsystems, and network transmission using compressed color and depth video streams. Other contributions include a novel image-based geometry fusion algorithm, free-space dereverberation, and talker localization.
```
@article{Lawrence2021,
  abbr = {SIGGRAPH},
  selected = true,
  author = {Lawrence, J. and Goldman, D. B and Achar, S. and Blascovich, G. M. and Desloge, J. G. and Fortes, T. and Gomez, E. M. and Häberling, S. and Hoppe, H. and Huibers, A. and Knaus, C. and Kuschak, B. and Martin-Brualla, R. and Nover, H. and Russell, A. I. and Seitz, S. M. and Tong, K.},
  title = {Project Starline: A high-fidelity telepresence system},
  journal = {ACM Transactions on Graphics (Proc. of SIGGRAPH Asia)},
  year = {2021},
  volume = {40},
  number = {6},
  html = {https://research.google/pubs/pub50903}
}
```
SIGGRAPH
GenBRDF: Discovering New Analytic BRDFs with Genetic Programming

Brady, A., Lawrence, J., Peers, P., and Weimer, W.

ACM Transactions on Graphics (Proc. of SIGGRAPH) 33(4), 2014.

Abs BibTeX

We present a framework for learning new analytic BRDF models through Genetic Programming that we call genBRDF. This approach to reflectance modeling can be seen as an extension of traditional methods that rely either on a phenomenological or empirical process. Our technique augments the human effort involved in deriving mathematical expressions that accurately characterize complex high-dimensional reflectance functions through a large-scale optimization. We present a number of analysis tools and data visualization techniques that are crucial to sifting through the large result sets produced by genBRDF in order to identify fruitful expressions. Additionally, we highlight several new models found by genBRDF that have not previously appeared in the BRDF literature. These new BRDF models are compact and more accurate than current state-of-the-art alternatives.
```
@article{Brady2014,
  abbr = {SIGGRAPH},
  selected = true,
  author = {Brady, A. and Lawrence, J. and Peers, P. and Weimer, W.},
  title = {GenBRDF: Discovering New Analytic BRDFs with Genetic Programming},
  journal = {ACM Transactions on Graphics (Proc. of SIGGRAPH)},
  year = {2014},
  volume = {33},
  number = {4},
  issn = {0730-0301},
  html = {https://doi.org/10.1145/2601097.2601193}
}
```
SIGGRAPH
Genetic Programming for Shader Simplification

Sitthi-Amorn, P., Modly, N., Weimer, W., and Lawrence, J.

ACM Transactions on Graphics (Proc. of SIGGRAPH Asia) 30(6), 2011.

Abs BibTeX

We present a framework based on Genetic Programming (GP) for automatically simplifying procedural shaders. Our approach computes a series of increasingly simplified shaders that expose the inherent trade-off between speed and accuracy. Compared to existing automatic methods for pixel shader simplification [Olano et al. 2003; Pellacini 2005], our approach considers a wider space of code transformations and produces faster and more faithful results. We further demonstrate how our cost function can be rapidly evaluated using graphics hardware, which allows tens of thousands of shader variants to be considered during the optimization process. Our approach is also applicable to multi-pass shaders and perceptual-based error metrics.
```
@article{Sitthiamorn2011,
  abbr = {SIGGRAPH},
  selected = true,
  author = {Sitthi-Amorn, P. and Modly, N. and Weimer, W. and Lawrence, J.},
  title = {Genetic Programming for Shader Simplification},
  journal = {ACM Transactions on Graphics (Proc. of SIGGRAPH Asia)},
  year = {2011},
  volume = {30},
  number = {6},
  html = {https://doi.org/10.1145/2070781.2024186}
}
```
SIGGRAPH
A Coaxial Optical Scanner for Synchronous Acquisition of 3D Geometry and Surface Reflectance

Holroyd, M., Lawrence, J., and Zickler, T.

ACM Transactions on Graphics (Proc. of SIGGRAPH) 29(4), 2010.

Abs Supp BibTeX

We present a novel optical setup and processing pipeline for measuring the 3D geometry and spatially-varying surface reflectance of physical objects. Central to our design is a digital camera and a high frequency spatially-modulated light source aligned to share a common focal point and optical axis. Pairs of such devices allow capturing a sequence of images from which precise measurements of geometry and reflectance can be recovered. Our approach is enabled by two technical contributions: a new active multiview stereo algorithm and an analysis of light descattering that has important implications for image-based reflectometry. We show that the geometry measured by our scanner is accurate to within 50 microns at a resolution of roughly 200 microns and that the reflectance agrees with reference data to within 5.5%. Additionally, we present an image relighting application and show renderings that agree very well with reference images at light and view positions far from those that were initially measured.
```
@article{Holroyd2010,
  abbr = {SIGGRAPH},
  selected = true,
  author = {Holroyd, M. and Lawrence, J. and Zickler, T.},
  title = {A Coaxial Optical Scanner for Synchronous Acquisition of 3D Geometry and Surface Reflectance},
  journal = {ACM Transactions on Graphics (Proc. of SIGGRAPH)},
  year = {2010},
  month = jul,
  volume = {29},
  number = {4},
  html = {https://doi.org/10.1145/1778765.1778836},
  supp = {coaxial_analysis.pdf}
}
```
SIGGRAPH
Inverse Shade Trees for Non-Parametric Material Representation and Editing

Lawrence, J., Ben-Artzi, A., DeCoro, C., Matusik, W., Pfister, H., Ramamoorthi, R., and Rusinkiewicz, S.

ACM Transactions on Graphics (Proc. of SIGGRAPH) 25(3), 2006.

Abs BibTeX

Recent progress in the measurement of surface reflectance has created a demand for non-parametric appearance representations that are accurate, compact, and easy to use for rendering. Another crucial goal, which has so far received little attention, is editability: for practical use, we must be able to change both the directional and spatial behavior of surface reflectance (e.g., making one material shinier, another more anisotropic, and changing the spatial "texture maps" indicating where each material appears). We introduce an Inverse Shade Tree framework that provides a general approach to estimating the "leaves" of a user-specified shade tree from high-dimensional measured datasets of appearance. These leaves are sampled 1- and 2-dimensional functions that capture both the directional behavior of individual materials and their spatial mixing patterns. In order to compute these shade trees automatically, we map the problem to matrix factorization and introduce a flexible new algorithm that allows for constraints such as non-negativity, sparsity, and energy conservation. Although we cannot infer every type of shade tree, we demonstrate the ability to reduce multi-gigabyte measured datasets of the Spatially-Varying Bidirectional Reflectance Distribution Function (SVBRDF) into a compact representation that may be edited in real time.
```
@article{Lawrence2006,
  abbr = {SIGGRAPH},
  selected = {true},
  author = {Lawrence, J. and Ben-Artzi, A. and DeCoro, C. and Matusik, W. and Pfister, H. and Ramamoorthi, R. and Rusinkiewicz, S.},
  title = {Inverse Shade Trees for Non-Parametric Material Representation and Editing},
  journal = {ACM Transactions on Graphics (Proc. of SIGGRAPH)},
  year = {2006},
  volume = {25},
  number = {3},
  html = {https://doi.org/10.1145/1141911.1141949}
}
```