Member Profile: Ming Lin
1. What do you do, and how long have you been doing it?
I am a professor at the University of Maryland at College Park. I have been a university professor since 1993, with a break between 1995-1997.
2. What was your first job?
A cashier at a Deli Sandwich Shop, owned by my parents.
3. Where did you complete your formal education?
University of California at Berkeley (BS, MS, and PhD)
4. How did you first get involved with ACM SIGGRAPH?
When I organized the General-Purpose computing using GPU (GPGPU) Workshop, that was co-located with SIGGRAPH.
5. What is your favorite memory of a SIGGRAPH conference?
Creative Fast Forward – I don’t remember the year, but recall how in a few humorous words in just seconds capturing the essence of the paper.
6. Describe a project that you would like to share with the ACM SIGGRAPH community.
My most recent efforts on “Differentiable Physics”, which enables model-based principles to be integrated with statistical learning to solve many real-world problems involving dynamical systems much more efficiently.
7. If you could have dinner with one living or non-living person, who would it be and why?
Barak Obama – what’s his experience growing up being a biracial child and what/how he learned from these experiences. What motivated him to be a president given his childhood
8. What is something most people don’t know about you?
I was an undergraduate student at UCLA, before transferring to UC Berkeley.
9. From which single individual have you learned the most in your life? What did they teach you?
My parents – be nice & kind to others, give back & serve, and work hard.
10. Is there someone in particular who has influenced your decision to work with ACM SIGGRAPH?
The community of SIGGRAPH researchers and students.
11. What can you point to in your career as your proudest moment?
When my former Ph.D. students received recognitions (e.g. when Kelly Ward, my first woman Ph.D. student while at Disney, won her Technical Oscars, when my other Ph.D. student Ted Kim now at Yale received his 2nd Sci-Tech Oscars, when Miguel Otaduy at Madrid in Spain received his first ERC grant, etc.) and when our research got used in over 60 companies worldwide, and when our research at Amazon was launched as the first 3D Virtual-Try-on system for Merch-by-Amazon!!!