I ran into David Knott at the Electronic Arts party on Wednesday night. Mr. Knott is a graduate student at University of North Carolina (UNC), Chappel Hill. I was able to ask him a couple questions regarding his flamboyant, if not scandalous, Fast Forward presentation on Sunday night.

Mr. Knott assured me that the partial nudity was not pre-planned nor did it have the approval of his advisor. In fact, his advisor (who will remain anonymous - in order to protect the innocent) was not even present during the Fast Forward session.

I asked Mr. Knott how and why he came to the decision to pull off his shirt. He told me that he had prepared two boring slides and had practiced his talk at UNC - but that no one had given him any guidance regarding the Fast Forward presentation.

Sizing up his competition, which included odes, raps, songs, skits, etc., Mr. Knott came to the conclusion that drastic measures were needed in order to promote his paper Interactive Collision Detection between Deformable Models using Chromatic Decomposition. While in line, he decided to pull off his shirt to demonstrate the difference in deformability between his T-shirt and his skin.

I asked Mr. Knott if his nudity did the trick. He replied, "Yes, people came to my talk."