COLOMBIA COMPUTER GRAPHICS INITIATIVE

Well, I, Oscar Xavier Chavarro, available via email at ojchavarro@javeriana.edu.co and via MSN at suicide_jedilink@hotmail.com have been talking with a lot of interesting people in the area of Bogotá Colombia. I think that there are a lot of oportunities for the development of a local computer graphics industry, so I have decided to make public mi personal list of contacts, with the desire of catalizing academic and business oportunities for all.

Please, if you are in this list, and find this public contact table intrusive, feel free to contact me, so I get you removed, or your information updated, corrected or "censored". If you would like to be added here, contact me also, and don't forget to give me a chat.

MY INTERESTS AND OBJECTIVES AS ACADEMIC AGENT

What do I want with this list? What can I offer?, Well, this is a very important question. Let me try to explain my thoughts with this ideas:

I want that related people look themselves as COLEAGES, not as RACERS. I think that (at the team/corporate level) in Colombia are to small to compete against global market, and we must do it together.
I am an employee of Pontificia Universidad Javeriana (PUJ). So, it is my duty to take care of my Universities' interests. As such, I pretend to ease in the creation of a computer graphics community, at an academic and industrial level. I have no uniqueness contract with PUJ, but in general I am not interested in becoming part of specific business. I just want to ease from academy, but I have no time to participate directly in any particular iniciative. What I do want, is to give people advice, to discuss ideas with colleagues, to introduce and promote the work of the research group I work for (Takina at PUJ) to people in the computer graphics field, and particullary, to promote projects where PUJ could participate as an academic agent.

So, if you want to know how could interactions be made with PUJ, take into consideration that probably, this will fall in any of the following schema:

A PUJ student makes an internship in a computer graphics field company. This should fall under PUJ's regulations for industrial internships. Our interest for this choice at PUJ is primarly focused to an internship in USA, Canada, western Europe, Australia or Japan. Under very special circumstances and very high quality conditions for the student, Colombia based internships could be analized case by case.
A PUJ student develops an "applied development/research" graduate option, where an specific computer graphics software based research or development benefits a corporation. Note that under this schema, all results must be GPLized.
PUJ graduate promotion
Join research project
Social impact projects

INTERESTING PEOPLE I KNOW, RELEVANT FOR THE COMPUTER GRAPHICS INDUSTRY

In the following table, you will find a list of names. I have personal information for all these people, but I don't want to post it here directly, to protect their mail boxes from spam (published URLs and e-mails have been posted under the request of the owner) . Each person, as is my current understanding, is "categorized" under a set of roles. Each role refers to a known skill and/or interest showed by each individual. The roles listed are from the following list:

Hardware developer: this relates to mechanical and/or electrical engineering capabilities
Programmer: this relates to advanced 3D computer graphics programming capabilities.
Programmer: this relates to advanced 3D computer graphics software design capabilities and experience.
Digital artist / modeler
Digital artist / animator
Digital artist / musician: interested in 3D product project development pipeline

Name	Playing roles	Public comments
Oscar Chavarro	Programmer Software architect	Currently at Pontificia Universidad Javeriana, working as computer graphics researcher and teacher in computer science. MSN: suicide_jedilink@hotmail.com
David Díaz	Programmer Software architect
Andrés Acero	Programmer	Currently at Farmacity
Daniel Barrero	Programmer Philosophy Doctor Software architect	Currently in the videogames industry at Vancouver, Canada, but closely related with the Bogotá computer graphics initiative.
Iván Alviar	Digital artist / modeler Digital artist / animator	Currently owner of a animation studio
Iván Chavarro	Digital artist / modeler Digital artist / animator
Yana Saint-Priest	Programmer (Artifitial Intelligence) Software architect (Artifitial Intelligence)	Currently at Fundación Universitaria San Martín (FUSM). Computer graphics professor at FUSM.
Mauricio Gómez	Hardware developer	Currently at "Medicina Legal", Bogotá. Computer graphics professor at Politécnico Grancolombiano. Personal webpage: http://mgomez1974.googlepages.com, MSN/mail: mgomez1974@hotmail.com
John Nichols	Hardware developer	Currently at BodyTech
José Tiberio Hernández	Philosophy Doctor	Currently at Universidad de los Andes. Computer graphics research lab. leader.
Fernando de la Rosa	Philosophy Doctor Virtual reality	Currently at Universidad de los Andes. Computer graphics and VR professor at UniAndes.
Pablo Figueroa	Philosophy Doctor Virtual reality Interaction techniques	Currently at Universidad de los Andes.
Marcela Hernández	Philosophy Doctor Scientific visualization	Currently at Universidad de los Andes.
Helmut Treftz	Philosophy Doctor Networked VR environments	Currently at EAFIT (Medellín)
Hamilton Hernández	Computer graphics and virtual reality teaching and research	Currently at Universidad del Quindío (Armenia)
Germán Acosta	Programmer (Artifitial Intelligence) Software architect (Artifitial Intelligence)	Currently at Oracle
Gina Chiquillo	Programmer
David Camelo	Programmer Video game developer

EXTERNAL LINKS

The following are links of interest related with computer graphics topics, and with Colombia regional computer graphics industry. Note that this links are not directly related with this page. These links, and the work shown there are propierty of their authors. They are here as are of interest to this group.

Immersion Games (http://www.immersionsoftware.com) (http://www.dinero.com.co/wf_InfoArticulo.aspx?IdArt=26329). This is a Colombia based company making developments in video game industry.