At Roblox, our researchers drive our imaginative and prescient to reimagine the way in which individuals come collectively. We now have over 100 PhDs collaborating throughout the elemental Roblox Analysis group and utilized Information Science & Analytics, Consumer Analysis, and superior engineering R&D groups. Collectively, they devise the way forward for Roblox, serving to us really ship on our price of “taking the lengthy view.”
The Roblox Analysis scientists publish findings in educational conferences, launch open supply and information, collaborate with universities, and bootstrap transferring outcomes into manufacturing. Listed below are the group members answerable for that innovation.
Morgan McGuire
Chief Scientist
Current Publications
Prof. McGuire accelerates innovation throughout Roblox by coordinating all the analysis teams and instantly managing Roblox Analysis in addition to the engineering growth of the Sport Engine product.
Morgan has co-authored a whole lot of papers and patents, spanning many areas of laptop science from networking and compilers to 3D graphics, in addition to a number of textbooks together with Pc Graphics: Ideas & Follow third Version, The Graphics Codex, and Creating Video games. Morgan co-founded the Journal of Pc Graphics Strategies and chaired ACM SIGGRAPH NPAR, I3D, HPG, and a number of other different conferences. Morgan’s product contributions embrace NVIDIA RTXGI and Reflex SDKs and RTX GPUs; the Skylanders®, Name of Responsibility®, Marvel: Final Alliance®, and Titan Quest® video video games sequence; the Unity recreation engine; the E Ink show used within the Amazon Kindle®; and the open supply G3D Innovation Engine and Markdeep doc system.
Morgan holds present college appointments on the College of Waterloo and McGill College, was a full professor at Williams School, and acquired a PhD and MS in laptop science from Brown College and an MEng and BS in electrical engineering from MIT.
Victor Zordan
Principal Scientist
Current Publications
Prof. Zordan investigates the broad space of laptop graphics and interactive strategies, with specializations in laptop animation with bodily fashions, VR, movement seize, and interfaces.
He’s the Editor-in-Chief of the Proceedings of the ACM in Pc Graphics and Interactive Strategies (PACMCGIT), chaired and arranged the ACM SIGGRAPH Symposium on Pc Animation (SCA) and the ACM SIGGRAPH Movement, Interplay, and Video games (MIG) conferences, and served on many program committees.
He was a school member for twenty years, most not too long ago as a full professor main the Visible Computing Division of the Faculty of Computing at Clemson College, the place he continues to carry an adjunct analysis college member place. He acquired his PhD in Pc Science from the Georgia Institute of Know-how.
Arjun Guha
Senior Scientist
Current Publications
Prof. Guha has broad pursuits in programming languages and techniques and researches issues that come up in internet safety, software-defined networking, distributed techniques, and robotics. At Roblox, Arjun is working to make the platform dramatically extra scalable and simpler to program.
Arjun holds a place as Affiliate Professor of Pc Science at Northeastern College and leads an educational group there. He acquired his PhD from Brown College and BA from Grinnell School.
Cem Yuksel
Senior Scientist
Current Publications
Prof. Yuksel investigates laptop graphics and associated fields, together with physically-based simulations, practical picture synthesis, rendering strategies, international illumination, sampling, GPU algorithms, graphics {hardware}, modeling advanced geometries, and knitted constructions, together with hair modeling, animation, and rendering. His introductory and superior graphics lecture movies which can be freely out there on-line are watched by hundreds of graphics college students, professionals, and lovers worldwide.
Cem chaired and arranged the ACM SIGGRAPH/Eurographics Excessive-Efficiency Graphics (HPG) and ACM SIGGRAPH Symposium on Interactive 3D Graphics and Video games (I3D) conferences, along with contributing to quite a few conferences as a program committee member. He’s the Actual-Time Stay! program chair for SIGGRAPH 2023 and the founding father of graphics software program firm Cyber Radiance LLC.
Cem presently holds an Affiliate Professor place within the Faculty of Computing on the College of Utah. Beforehand, he was a postdoctoral fellow at Cornell College after receiving his PhD diploma in Pc Science from Texas A&M College.
Tania Lorido-Botrán
Analysis Scientist
Current Publications
Dr. Tania Lorido-Botrán is presently a Analysis Scientist at Roblox. Previous to that, she labored at Microsoft and the Pacific Northwest Nationwide Laboratory. Her analysis pursuits lie throughout machine studying, techniques, and optimization.
Dr. Lorido-Botran acquired her PhD from the College of Deusto in Spain with a cum laude distinction, and her grasp’s diploma in Distributed Methods from College of the Basque Nation with a highest marks distinction.
Tony Liu
Analysis Program Supervisor
Current Publications
Tony Liu researches psychological wellness, healthcare, and digital civility by combining strategies from causal inference and machine studying. He beforehand labored at IBM Watson Well being and has revealed in Nature Computational Science in addition to ICML and AAAI workshops. He coordinates educational collaboration, expertise switch, and exterior communication for Roblox Analysis.
Tony holds a BA in Pc Science with highest honors from Williams School. He’s finishing a PhD in Pc and Data Sciences on the College of Pennsylvania suggested by Profs. Lyle Ungar and Konrad Kording.
Layla Mah
Senior Technical Director
Layla Mah optimizes all elements of the Roblox distributed system for runtime scalability and inside engineering effectivity.
She can be recognized for her work as CEO of InsightfulVR, growing their decoupled gentle subject rendering and streaming engine, and their PerfLab efficiency automation system; co-founder of Fringe Studios, which makes a speciality of AAA recreation engine optimization; Lead Architect of VR and Superior Rendering at AMD; and contributions to transport many PC and console recreation titles, together with the Sid Meier’s Civilization, Thief, BioShock, and Infinite Disaster recreation sequence.
Layla carried out undergraduate and graduate analysis in laptop graphics, physics simulation, and robotics on the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.
Kiran Bhat
Senior Director
Dr. Bhat is the Senior Director of Engineering in Roblox’s Sport Engine division, overseeing the analysis and growth of real-time deep studying applied sciences for 3D avatars. Kiran was the co-founder/CTO of Loom.ai, which merged with Roblox in December 2020. Kiran’s group at Loom.ai constructed lifelike human face visualizations by mechanically changing selfies into expressive 3D avatars that work together in actual time with visible and audio alerts.
Kiran gained the 2017 Sci-Tech Oscar for architecting ILM’s facial efficiency seize engine that was used to create a number of iconic film characters just like the Hulk in Marvel’s The Avengers, the Orcs in Warcraft, and to “convey again” Peter Cushing’s Grand Moff Tarkin in Rogue One: A Star Wars Story.
Kiran acquired his PhD in Robotics from the Faculty of Pc Science, Carnegie Mellon College.
Mitesh Shah
Senior Director
Mitesh Shah is the Senior Director of Programming Languages for the Sport Engine product and instantly manages analysis and growth of languages and programming fashions that energy the creation of thousands and thousands of experiences on Roblox. Beforehand, he constructed and led high-performance R&D groups at Meta, Synopsys, and start-ups delivering state-of-the-art options within the PL area. All through his profession, Mitesh developed compilers and programming fashions for an enormous number of processor architectures together with massively parallel processors, community processors, extremely embedded RISCs, Vector DSPs, VLIW machines, and neural community ML accelerators.
Mitesh holds an MS in laptop science from Texas A&M College and his analysis pursuits embrace parallelizing compilers and processor structure, together with exploiting perf, effectivity, reliability, and safety by way of PL and runtime.
Kenny Mitchell
Technical Director
Current Publications
Prof. Mitchell is a Technical Director of Rendering at Roblox. He has patented over 50 innovations and authored and co-authored over 100 technical papers.
He delivers inventive applied sciences to the widest audiences together with the BAFTA award-winning BoomBlox® with Steven Spielberg; the Command & Conquer®, Disney Infinity®, Harry Potter® sequence of video video games; Star Wars® & Avatar® rides/animatronics; and the Discovering Dory® and Pirates of the Caribbean® motion pictures.
A founding co-editor-in-chief of the ACM Video games journal and affiliate editor of Proceedings of the ACM Pc Graphics & Interactive Strategies (PACM CGIT) and Elsevier Computer systems & Graphics (C&G) journals, he has chaired ACM SIGGRAPH Interactive 3D Graphics and Video games (I3D), CVMP and RVCAI worldwide conferences and is a member of the SIGGRAPH convention advisory group. Kenny is a co-founder of 3Finery™, bringing objects to life and non-executive director of Cobra Simulation™ disrupting immersive software program.
Kenny holds a place as full professor and chair of Video Sport Know-how at Edinburgh Napier College. He earned his PhD and MS from the college of computing, and an honor’s diploma in Pc Science and Synthetic Intelligence from Edinburgh College.
Alan Jeffrey
Principal Software program Engineer
Current Publications
Dr. Jeffrey coordinates the design and implementation of the Luau kind system, which helps drive lots of the options of growth in Roblox Studio.
Alan has over 30 years of expertise with analysis in programming languages, together with publishing papers and serving on this system committees of Ideas Of Programming Languages (POPL), Worldwide Convention On Purposeful Programming (ICFP), and Logic In Pc Science (LICS). He has served on the Steering Committee and Organizing Committee of ICFP, and as Normal Chair of LICS. He has been an lively member of open supply software program tasks reminiscent of LaTeX, Agda, Servo, and Luau.
Alan has a D.Phil. from the College of Oxford.
Mahesh Nandwana
Principal Machine Studying Scientist
Current Publications
Mahesh leads audio ML tasks at Roblox. His areas of experience embrace speech and speaker recognition, voice exercise detection, audio classification, and speech enhancement.
Earlier than Roblox, Mahesh was a technical lead within the Siri Notion group at Apple. He additionally labored as an Superior Pc Scientist at SRI Worldwide and was concerned in DARPA RATS and MediFor applications
He has revealed greater than 20 papers. He has served as a reviewer for conferences and journals together with NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, IEEE/ACM TASLP, Speech Communication, Interspeech, and ICASSP. He earned an MS diploma from UT Dallas.
Linwan Music
Analysis Assistant
Linwan works on open supply tasks for Roblox Analysis and helps facilitate expertise transfers from Analysis to Roblox Engineering.
She accomplished an undergraduate analysis assistantship with Prof. Toshiya Hachisuka on the College of Waterloo, in addition to internships at Google and Autodesk.
Linwan holds a bachelor’s diploma in Pc Science from the College of Waterloo.