• dev
• games
• edu

Areas of interest:

Interactive Sound Propagation : Visibility & Rendering : Parallel & High Performance Computing

Education:

• PhD, MS - Computer Science, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
  "Interactive Sound Propagation for Massive Multi-user and Dynamic Virtual Environments"
• BS - Computer Science, Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology

Skills:

• Programming: C, C++, HLSL, Javascript, PHP, Bash, MIPS32, Verilog
• APIs & Tools: Vulkan, DX12, OpenMP, Perforce, SFML, Linux, Apache, Git, GDB, Visual Studio
• Soft skills: Conflict resolver, Accessibility focused, Structured planner

Work experience:

• Volition - Champaign, IL, 2019-2023
  Principal Programmer - Rendering
  • Created high contrast rendering mode with configurable colors and highlights
  • Invented Adaptive Quality Management for maintaining high framerates
  • Designed multi-track weather control system with effect spawning and local volumes
  • Optimized gameplay and rendering systems targetting 6 platforms across 12 hardware variations (PS4, PS5, Xbox1, XboxS, PC, Stadia)
  • Developed efficient algorithms for consoles and PC, including DX12 memory defragmenting, undergrowth deformation, layered materials, and particle/fog visibility control volumes
  • Responsible for particle system, including robust randomization, seamless ribbon interpolation, turbulence and wind effects, and emission frame smoothing

• Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology - Terre Haute, IN, 2012-2019
  Associate Professor with Tenure
  • Invented and developed auditory display headset
  • Created interactive web based acoustic simulator with cross compiled C++ backend
  • Designed Markdown/LaTeX based course description language
  • Taught computer systems, CPU caching, parallel programming, x86/ARM/MIPS assembly, and CPU architecture and design
  • Supervised over 100 student projects, including CPU hardwware, realtime ray tracers, and automatic parallelization
  • Designed intro and advanced cross platform graphics courses on rasterization, realtime ray tracing, GPGPU, and image processing (Windows, MacOS, Linux)

• Green Hills Software - Santa Barbara, CA, 2018 Summer
  Software Engineer

  • Solved debugging issues using advanced logging, recording, and playback debugging systems
  • Investigated and documented advanced debugging techniques
  • Designed undergraduate course on robust and repeatable debugging processes
• Impulsonic (now Valve) - Carrboro, NC, 2016 Summer
  Senior Researcher
  • Developed proprietary acoustic algorithms for game middleware
  • Developed software with team in-office and remotely

• Dolby - San Francisco, CA, 2010 Summer
  Research Intern

  • Designed fast GPU and CPU based audio rendering system
  • Collaborated with senior researchers on networked audio systems for hundreds of clients
  • Created visibility based culling for massive acoustic scenes

• University of North Carolina, Gamma group - Chapel Hill, NC, 2007-2012
  Research Assistant

  • Created interactive GPU based sound propagation system for early specular reflection and diffraction
  • Designed interactive acoustic simulation with diffuse, specular, and diffraction components
  • Developed diffraction tracing using real-time ray frustum tracer
  • Author or co-author on 8 acoustic papers, resulting in 3 patents
• Baker Hill - Carmel, IN, 2004-2007
  Software Engineer
  • Served as lead designer on critical path projects for major loan origination products
  • Developed tools to automate refactoring of over 50,000 lines of code
  • Designed and implemented automatic build and deploy process across multiple platforms and devices

Undergraduate theses advised:

• Splashes and Water Wave Packets, Xingfang Yuan, 2018
  Winner of best thesis award
• Automatic Parallelism in Javascript, Rose Reatherford, 2016
• VR Cultural Heritage Sites, Si Faye Li, 2016

Independent studies advised:

• Proprietary High Performance Shortest Euclidean Path, Charles Horton, Xingfang Yuan, 2017
• Bluetooth Driver for XBOX 360 Controllers, Josh Maurer, 2016
• VGA Driver for Spartan 6 FPGA, Jake Whiteley, 2016
• Web Based Acoustic Simulator, Xianbo 'Francis' Meng, 2015

Patents:

1. US 8995675 Methods and systems for direct-to-indirect acoustic radiance transfer, Anish Chandak, Lakulish Antani, Micah Taylor, Dinesh Manocha
2. US 8958567 Method and system for split client-server reverberation processing, Nicolas Tsingos, Micah Taylor
3. US 8847965 Methods, systems, and computer readable media for fast geometric sound propagation using visibility computations, Anish Chandak, Lakulish Antani, Micah Taylor, Dinesh Manocha

Projects:

• Invented an Auditory Display Headset capable of creating audio landscapes from real world objects.
• Created libchb, a library to display images in text mode terminals.
• Designed CourseUp, a domain specific language for defining college courses.
• Implemented platform independent realtime renderer. Supports realtime ray tracing, software rasterization, photon mapping, and sound propagation.
• Designed and implemented fast motion blur effects using sample reprojection. Generates similar results to stochastic motion blur at a fraction of the cost.
• Maintain and host my personal webpage. Custom markdown extensions with dynamic backend.

Publications:

Journals and conferences

1. Micah Taylor. CourseUp: Human readable course language, Journal of Computing Sciences in Colleges 2018
   10.5555/3280489.3280506
2. Micah Taylor, Sid Stamm, and Christine Taylor. The impact of changing homework frequency in a computer architecture course, Journal of Computing Sciences in Colleges 2018
   10.5555/3280489.3280500
3. Micah Taylor and Francis Meng. Web-based geometric acoustic simulator, 23rd International ACM Conference on 3D Web Technology 2018
   10.1145/3208806.3208817
4. Micah Taylor, Anish Chandak, Qi Mo, Christian Lauterbach, Carl Schissler, and Dinesh Manocha. Guided Multiview Ray Tracing for Fast Auralization, IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics 2012 (26%)
   10.1109/TVCG.2012.27
5. Lakulish Antani, Anish Chandak, Micah Taylor, Dinesh Manocha. Direct-to-Indirect Acoustic Radiance Transfer, IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics 2012 (26%)
   10.1109/TVCG.2011.76
6. Lakulish Antani, Anish Chandak, Micah Taylor, Dinesh Manocha. Efficient finite-edge diffraction using conservative from-region visibility, Applied Acoustics 2011 (43%)
   10.1016/j.apacoust.2011.09.004
7. Anish Chandak, Lakulish Antani, Micah Taylor, Dinesh Manocha. Fast and Accurate Geometric Sound Propagation using Visibility Computations, International Symposium on Room Acoustics 2010 10.1260/1351-010X.18.1-2.123
8. Micah Taylor, Anish Chandak, Lakulish Antani, Dinesh Manocha. RESound: Interactive Sound Rendering for Dynamic Virtual Environments, 17th International ACM Conference on Multimedia 2009 (16%)
   10.1145/1631272.1631311
9. Anish Chandak, Lakulish Antani, Micah Taylor, Dinesh Manocha. FastV: From-point Visibility Culling on Complex Models, 20th Eurographics Symposium on Rendering 2009 (29%)
   10.1111/j.1467-8659.2009.01501.x
10. Micah Taylor, Anish Chandak, Zhimin Ren, Christian Lauterbach, Dinesh Manocha. Fast Edge-Diffraction for Sound Propagation in Complex Virtual Environments, EAA Symposium on Auralization 2009
11. Anish Chandak, Christian Lauterbach, Micah Taylor, Zhimin Ren, Dinesh Manocha. AD-Frustum: Adaptive Frustum Tracing for Interactive Sound Propagation, IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics 2008 (26%)
    10.1109/TVCG.2008.111

Technical reports

1. Micah Taylor, Nicolas Tsingos, Dinesh Manocha. Rendering environmental voice reverberation for large-scale distributed virtual worlds, 2014
2. Lakulish Antani, Anish Chandak, Micah Taylor, Dinesh Manocha. Direct-to-Indirect Acoustic Radiance Transfer, 2010
3. Lakulish Antani, Anish Chandak, Micah Taylor, Dinesh Manocha. Fast Geometric Sound Propagation with Finite Edge Diffraction, 2010

Other

1. Micah Taylor, Anish Chandak, Lakulish Antani, Dinesh Manocha, Interactive geometric sound propagation, EE Times, 2010
2. Micah Taylor, Anish Chandak, Lakulish Antani, Dinesh Manocha, Interactive Geometric Sound Propagation and Rendering, Intel Academic Spotlight, 2010
3. Micah Taylor, Anish Chandak, Zhimin Ren, Christian Lauterbach, Dinesh Manocha. Fast edge diffraction for sound propagation in complex virtual environments, Acoustical Society of America's North Carolina Chapter (Best presentation award), 2009