Amy Ashurst Gooch facts for kids

Amy Ashurst Gooch is an American computer scientist. She is well-known for her important work in a field called non-photorealistic rendering. This is a special way to make computer images look more like drawings, paintings, or cartoons, instead of super realistic photos.

Right now, she is the Chief Operations Officer at ViSOAR LLC. This company creates software that helps people understand lots of 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 areas like computer graphics, how people see and understand things (called perceptual psychology), and how computers can "see" (called computational vision). She wants to learn more about how we look at computer images. Her goal is to use this knowledge to create even better ways to make and show computer pictures.

Her Life and Discoveries

Amy Gooch started her journey in computer science at the University of Utah. She earned her first degree in Computer Engineering in 1996. Then, she got her master's degree in Computer Science in 1998.

While working on her master's, she explored a new way to create computer images. This was called interactive non-photorealistic technical illustration. During this time, she helped develop something famous called Gooch shading. She showed this new technique at a big computer graphics conference called SIGGRAPH in 1998.

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

In 2004, Amy Gooch began working on 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 a software called ViSUS into a useful product. Since 2014, she has been teaching as a professor at Texas A&M University.

Her Published Work

Amy Gooch has written important books that help others learn about computer graphics:

• 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