Amy Ashurst Gooch facts for kids

Amy Ashurst Gooch is an American computer scientist. She is well-known for her work in non-photorealistic rendering. This is a special area of computer graphics that makes images look more like drawings or paintings, instead of super realistic photos.

Today, she is the Chief Operations Officer at ViSOAR LLC. This company creates software to help people understand complex information using cool visuals. ViSOAR LLC started from the Scientific Computing and Imaging Institute. Amy Gooch also teaches computer science as a professor at Texas A&M University.

Her current research brings together different fields. These include computer graphics, which is about making images with computers, and perceptual psychology, which studies how people see and understand things. It also includes computational vision, which teaches computers to "see." She wants to understand how computers can show space and depth better. She also studies how our eyes use these clues. This helps her create new and improved ways for computers to draw images.

Amy Gooch's Life and Education

Amy Gooch earned her first degree, a Bachelor of Science in Computer Engineering, in 1996. She got this degree from the University of Utah. She continued her studies there and received her Master of Science in Computer Science in 1998.

Inventing Gooch Shading

While working on her master's degree, Amy Gooch explored a new way to create computer images. She focused on making technical drawings look more artistic, not just like photos. During this time, she developed something famous called Gooch shading. She shared this new idea at the 1998 SIGGRAPH conference. This conference is a big event for computer graphics experts.

Early Career and Writing

After getting her master's degree, she worked as a research scientist at the University of Utah for five years. In 1999, she helped teach a course at the SIGGRAPH conference about non-photorealistic rendering. She also wrote the first textbook in this field with her husband, Bruce Gooch. The book is called Non-Photorealistic Rendering.

Further Studies and Teaching

In 2004, Amy Gooch started her PhD in computer science at Northwestern University. She finished her PhD in 2006. After that, she became an assistant professor of computer science at the University of Victoria in British Columbia. In 2013, she joined the Scientific Computing and Imaging Institute. There, she helped turn their ViSUS software into a useful product. Since 2014, she has been an adjunct professor of computer science at Texas A&M University.

Books and Publications

Amy Gooch has co-authored an important book in her field:

• Bruce Gooch, Amy Ashurst Gooch, Non-Photorealistic Rendering, AK Peters, July 2001, ISBN: 978-1-56881-133-8

See also

• Gooch shading
• Scientific Computing and Imaging Institute