Rahul Banerjee
  • <my-last-name>@cs.uw.edu
Portrait of Rahul Banerjee

I am interested in broadening access to computational literacy.

Our world runs on computers, making it important to have an understanding of computers as programmable machines. To convey this understanding to as diverse an audience as possible, we need to broaden the set of pathways available to novices learning about computer programming.

My research philosophy is reflected in the design of BlockStudio, a text-free and visually concrete environment for authoring programs. My work on BlockStudio has been published at IDC 2016 (pdf) and at CHI 2018 (pdf). If you're in a hurry, here's a 30-second video.

For a brief resume in PDF format, click here.

Interests

Computational Literacy, Visual Programming Systems, Human-Computer Interaction

Selected Publications

  • Banerjee, R., Liu, L., Sobel, K., Pitt, C., Lee, K.J., Wang, M., Chen, S., Davison, L., Yip, J., Ko, A., & Popovič, Z. (2018). Empowering families facing English literacy challenges to jointly engage in computer programming.

    [PDF – Full Paper]

    In Proceedings of SIGCHI Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2018)

    🎖 Honourable mention (Top 5% out of 2,500+ submissions)

  • Banerjee, R., Lee, K.J., Yip, J., & Popovič, Z. (2016). Empowering Children to Rapidly Author Games and Animations Without Writing Code.

    [PDF – Short Paper]

    In Proceedings of the The 15th International Conference on Interaction Design and Children (IDC 2016), pp. 230–237.

  • Tuite, K., Banerjee, R., Snavely, N., Popovič, J., & Popovič, Z. (2016). PointCraft: Harnessing Players' FPS Skills to Interactively Trace Point Clouds in 3D.

    [PDF – Full Paper]

    In Foundations of Digital Games (FDG 2015)

    🎖 Best Paper (Serious Games track)

Education

Professional Experience

  • Research Assistant Center for Game Science

    Seattle, WA Fall 2011-2019

    Planned and conducted studies to understand, theorize, prototype, and improve upon existing environments for introductory programming. Built a Domain-Specific Language and User Interface for a new coding environment. Also built a website and user community around it.

  • Research Intern Pixar Animation Studios

    Emeryville, CA Summer 2012

    Physically-based illumination.

  • Technical Director, Character FX DreamWorks Animation

    Bangalore, India2009-2010

    Created real-time fur preview system for artists working on procedural fur (C++/OpenGL)

    Parallelized fur collision simulator to scale better on render farm.

    Supported 14 full-time artists, triaging and fixing geometry/rendering/pipeline issues.

  • Systems Software Engineer NVIDIA

    Bangalore, India 2005-2009

    Coded built-in vector math routines for first gpu implementation of OpenCL 1.0.

    Blit engine and shader linker for GeForce 8 OpenGL-ES 2.0 driver.

    Hand-tuned assembly for custom game engine.

    H.264-compliant video deblocking on custom hardware.

Teaching

  • Co-Instructor and Head TA Computer Graphics

    University of Washington, Seattle, WA Spring 2019

    Undergraduate class (66 students) covering image synthesis, modeling, and animation

Thanks to Andrés Monroy-Hernández for the use of his website template.