Keynote and Full Schedule Announced for Academy Software Foundation's Open Source Days 2023

Open Source Days adds new Virtual Town Hall Series for Foundation projects, leading up to the main program on August 6

LOS ANGELES, July 21, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- The Academy Software Foundation – the motion picture industry's premier organization for advancing open source software development across image creation, visual effects, animation, and sound technologies – has announced the full schedule for its upcoming Open Source Days event, with the Main Program taking place on August 6, accompanied by a new Virtual Town Hall Series with presentations scheduled from July 25 through August 3, and a full day of Birds of a Feather (BoF) sessions at SIGGRAPH on August 7.

Main Program Highlights

Held annually, Open Source Days is the leading event dedicated to furthering open source software development for the visual effects, animation, and digital content creation industries, bringing together leaders from creative studios, software and hardware makers, and more. The Main Program for Open Source Days will be held on August 6 in Los Angeles at the JW Marriott LA Live, with a virtual attendance option as well.

This year's Open Source Days keynote will be delivered by Wenzel Jakob, Assistant Professor in the Realistic Graphics Lab at Switzerland's EPFL School of Computer and Communication Sciences, on "Strategies for Open Source Development in Academia." Jakob has previously been recognized with the ACM SIGGRAPH Significant Researcher award, the Eurographics Young Researcher Award, and an ERC Starting Grant. His research revolves around inverse graphics, material appearance modeling, and physically-based rendering algorithms, driving his interest in solving real-world problems using invertible simulations and developing algorithms and systems to do so at scale. 

The Main Program also features a keynote panel titled "Towards 3D Interoperability with Universal Scene Description (OpenUSD)," featuring executives from Pixar, Apple, NVIDIA, Autodesk, and Adobe.

The day's programming will include many more talks with speakers from Amazon Web Services, Canonical, Cinesite, DNEG, Epic Games, Foundry, Intel, Jellyfish, and Orange Turbine. Featured sessions include:

• State of the Academy Software Foundation
• Gaffer: Open Source Lookdev, Lighting, and Automation
• Forty-Eight Stories: Open Source Inside Autodesk
• Multiple Architectures, One API: Embree 4.0 and Open Image Denoise 2.0
• Best Practices When Developing and Releasing Open Source Tools
• Using OpenAssetIO, OpenTimelineIO, and Open RV to Demonstrate the MovieLabs 2030 Vision
• Making xSTUDIO a Cross-Platform Reality
• Portable Render Jobs for Open Source Content Production Pipelines

View the full Main Program schedule here: https://events.linuxfoundation.org/open-source-days/program/schedule/

New Virtual Town Hall Series for Foundation Projects

The Academy Software Foundation is expanding Open Source Days this year with the addition of a new Virtual Town Hall Series taking place from July 25 - August 3, leading up to the Main Program on August 6. Academy Software Foundation projects and working groups including MaterialX, OpenColorIO, OpenAssetIO, Open Review Initiative, OpenTimelineIO, and OpenEXR, among others, will share milestones, highlights, future roadmaps, and answer questions from the community during 1-hour Town Halls. Both new and experienced users, contributors and anyone else interested in learning more about Foundation projects are invited to attend some or all of the Virtual Town Halls.

"We are very excited to be extending our program this year with our new Virtual Town Hall Series, which will increase accessibility and allow each of our projects ample time to deliver meaningful presentations as the number of hosted projects has grown considerably," said David Morin, Executive Director of the Academy Software Foundation.

View the full Virtual Town Hall schedule and register here: https://events.linuxfoundation.org/open-source-days/program/virtual-town-halls/ 

Both the Main Program on August 6 and the Virtual Town Halls are free and open to anyone interested in attending. For more information on Open Source Day and to register to attend, please visit: https://events.linuxfoundation.org/open-source-days/

SIGGRAPH Birds of a Feather Sessions

Open Source Days 2023 will conclude with a full day of open source Birds of a Feather sessions on Monday, August 7 at the JW Marriott LA Live. These BoFs will be in-person only and attendees must be registered through SIGGRAPH.

About the Academy Software Foundation
Developed in partnership by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and the Linux Foundation, the Academy Software Foundation was created to provide a world-class home for open source software developers in the motion picture and broader media industries to share resources and collaborate on technologies for image creation, visual effects, animation and sound. The Academy Software Foundation is home to DPEL, MaterialX, OpenAssetIO, OpenColorIO, OpenCue, OpenEXR, OpenFX, OpenImageIO, Open Shading Language, OpenTimelineIO, OpenVDB, Open Review Initiative, rawtoaces, and Rez. For more information about the Academy Software Foundation, visit https://www.aswf.io/.

SOURCE Academy Software Foundation