Position
Associate Professor of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering
Office
354 Information Technology and Engineering (ITE) Building
Contact Information
University of Maryland, Baltimore County
1000 Hilltop Circle
Baltimore, MD 21250
phone: (410) 455-3094
email: olano@cs.umbc.edu
Education
Ph.D., Computer Science, University of North Carolina, 1998
B.S., Electrical Engineering, University of Illinois, Champaign/Urbana, 1990
Research Areas
Dr. Marc Olano has been doing research on uses of graphics hardware for real-time 3D graphics and non-graphics applications for over 25 years. He is the director of UMBC’s game development track and 3D photogrammetric scanning facility. He is also Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Computer Graphics Techniques, an open-access journal dedicated to practical graphics research. Dr. Olano received his PhD from the University of North Carolina for the first high-level shading language for graphics hardware, now one of the defining features of all graphics accelerators. After his PhD, he worked at Silicon Graphics on some of the earliest commercial efforts to develop programmable graphics hardware. Since coming to UMBC, his work has focused on applications of this now ubiquitous hardware for computation, visualization and, of course, games. In support of the games aspects of that research focus, he spent a year at Firaxis games working on Civilization V, a year at Epic Games working with the Unreal Engine 4 rendering team, and has also worked with 2K, Activision, Big Huge Games, and Oxide Games. To learn more about Dr. Olano’s research pursuits, read his research profile.
Publications