Aaron E. Lefohn – ACM SIGGRAPH HISTORY ARCHIVES

Aaron E. Lefohn

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About Aaron E. Lefohn

Affiliations

Intel Corporation
University of California, Davis
NVIDIA
Pixar Animation Studios

Location

Seattle, Washington, United States of America

Bio

SIGGRAPH 2025

Aaron leads the Real-Time Graphics Research team at NVIDIA. Aaron has led real-time rendering and graphics programming model research teams for over a decade and has productized many research ideas into games, film rendering, GPU hardware, and GPU APIs.

Aaron Lefohn is vice president of graphics research at NVIDIA, overseeing teams focused on rendering, AI graphics, and graphics systems. His teams’ inventions have played key roles in bringing path tracing to real-time graphics and pioneering real-time AI computer graphics. Recent NVIDIA products derived from his teams’ inventions include DLSS, RTX Path Tracing, RTX Dynamic Illumination, Neural Shading, the Slang shading language, and more.

Aaron has led real-time rendering and graphics programming model research teams for over 15 years and has productized many inventions into games, professional graphics software, GPU hardware, and GPU graphics APIs.

Aaron holds a Ph.D. in computer science from UC Davis and an M.S. in computer science from the University of Utah.

SIGGRAPH 2010

Aaron Lefohn is a senior graphics architect at Intel where he leads a research team creating new interactive rendering algorithms for current and future graphics architectures. Aaron previously led Intel’s involvement in OpenCL where he contributed significantly to OpenCL’s heterogeneous parallel coordination API. Before joining Intel, he designed parallel programming models for graphics as Principal Engineer at the graphics startup, Neoptica. Aaron’s Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of California Davis predicted the transition to “Fully Programmable Graphics” and introduced new interactive rendering algorithms that use parallel algorithms to build complex dynamic data structures. Aaron also spent three years at Pixar working on interactive rendering tools for artists and GPU acceleration of RenderMan. Aaron was an NSF graduate fellow in computer science.  

SIGGRAPH Conference Organizing Committee Positions

Conference Contributions

Learning

Courses

2025 Course_Duca_An Introduction to Neural Shading
An Introduction to Neural Shading
SIGGRAPH 2025
[Courses]
Organizer(s):
Presenter(s):
2019 25 Open Problems in Real-Time Rendering
Open Problems in Real-Time Rendering
SIGGRAPH 2019
[Courses]
Organizer(s):
Presenter(s):
Entry #: 25
2017 15 Open Problems in Real-Time Rendering
Open Problems in Real-Time Rendering
SIGGRAPH 2017
[Courses]
Organizer(s):
Presenter(s):
Entry #: 15
2016 18 Open Problems in Real-Time Rendering
Open Problems in Real-Time Rendering
SIGGRAPH 2016
[Courses]
Organizer(s):
Presenter(s):
Entry #: 18
2015 12 Bullet-Physics Simulation
Open Problems in Real-Time Rendering
SIGGRAPH 2015
[Courses]
Organizer(s):
Presenter(s):
Entry #: 12
2012 12 Beyond Programmable Shading
Beyond Programmable Shading
SIGGRAPH 2012
[Courses]
Organizer(s):
Presenter(s):
Entry #: 12
2011 10 Beyond Programmable Shading I
Beyond Programmable Shading I
SIGGRAPH 2011
[Courses]
Organizer(s):
Presenter(s):
Entry #: 10
2011 12 Beyond Programmable Shading II
Beyond Programmable Shading II
SIGGRAPH 2011
[Courses]
Organizer(s):
Presenter(s):
Entry #: 12
2010 19 Beyond Programmable Shading I
Beyond Programmable Shading I
SIGGRAPH 2010
[Courses]
Organizer(s):
Presenter(s):
Entry #: 19
2010 21 Beyond Programmable Shading II
Beyond Programmable Shading II
SIGGRAPH 2010
[Courses]
Organizer(s):
Presenter(s):
Entry #: 21
2009 17 Beyond Programmable Shading I
Beyond Programmable Shading I
SIGGRAPH 2009
[Courses]
Presenter(s):
Entry #: 17
2009 19 Beyond Programmable Shading II
Beyond Programmable Shading II
SIGGRAPH 2009
[Courses]
Presenter(s):
Entry #: 19
2008 Course Cover 06 Beyond Programmable Shading Fundamentals
Beyond Programmable Shading: Fundamentals
SIGGRAPH 2008
[Courses]
Organizer(s):
Presenter(s):
Entry #: 06
2008 Course Cover 07 Beyond Programmable Shading In Action
Beyond Programmable Shading: In Action
SIGGRAPH 2008
[Courses]
Organizer(s):
Presenter(s):
Entry #: 07
2007 Course Cover 24 GPGPU General Purpose Computation on Graphics Hardware
GPGPU: General-Purpose Computation on Graphics Hardware
SIGGRAPH 2007
[Courses]
Organizer(s):
Presenter(s):
Entry #: 24
2005 39 GPGPU: General-Purpose Computation on Graphics Hardware
GPGPU: General-Purpose Computation on Graphics Hardware
SIGGRAPH 2005
[Courses]
Organizer(s):
Presenter(s):
Entry #: 39
2004 32 GPGPU General-Purpose Computation on Graphics Hardware
GPGPU: General-Purpose Computation on Graphics Hardware
SIGGRAPH 2004
[Courses]
Organizer(s):
Presenter(s):
Entry #: 32
2004 28 Real-Time Volume Graphics
Real-Time Volume Graphics
SIGGRAPH 2004
[Courses]
Organizer(s):
Presenter(s):
Entry #: 28

Talks-Sketches

2005 Talks: Lefohn_Dynamic Adaptive Shadow Maps on Graphics Hardware
Dynamic Adaptive Shadow Maps on Graphics Hardware
SIGGRAPH 2005
[Talks-Sketches]
Presenter(s):
2005 Talks: Kniss_Octree Textures on Graphics Hardware
Octree textures on graphics hardware
SIGGRAPH 2005
[Talks-Sketches]
Presenter(s):

Technical Papers

2023 SA_Technical_Papers_Bangaru_SLANG.D_Fast, Modular and Differentiable Shader Programming
SLANG.D: Fast, Modular and Differentiable Shader Programming
SIGGRAPH Asia 2023
[Technical Papers]
Presenter(s):
2016 SA Technical Papers_Patney_Towards Foveated Rendering for Gaze-Tracked Virtual Reality
Towards foveated rendering for gaze-tracked virtual reality
SIGGRAPH Asia 2016
[Technical Papers]
Presenter(s):
2024 Technical Papers: Zeltner_Real-Time Neural Appearance Models
Real-Time Neural Appearance Models
SIGGRAPH 2024
[Technical Papers]
Presenter(s):
2023 Technical Papers: Vaidyanathan_Random-Access Neural Compression of Material Textures
Random-Access Neural Compression of Material Textures
SIGGRAPH 2023
[Technical Papers]
Presenter(s):
2020 Technical Paper: BITTERLI_Spatiotemporal reservoir resampling for real-time ray tracing with dynamic direct lighting
Spatiotemporal Reservoir Resampling for Real-time Ray Tracing With Dynamic Direct Lighting
SIGGRAPH 2020
[Technical Papers]
Presenter(s):
2017 Technical Paper: CHAITANYA_Interactive Reconstruction of Monte Carlo Image Sequences using a Recurrent Denoising Autoencoder
Interactive reconstruction of Monte Carlo image sequences using a recurrent denoising autoencoder
SIGGRAPH 2017
[Technical Papers]
Presenter(s):
2005 Technical Paper: Pellacini_Lpics: a Hybrid Hardware-Accelerated Relighting Engine for Computer Cinematography
Lpics: a hybrid hardware-accelerated relighting engine for computer cinematography
SIGGRAPH 2005
[Technical Papers]
Presenter(s):

Other Information

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