Alain Chesnais' Personal Home Page

Guess what I got for Xmas?



What I'm listening to

What I've been listening to this week

Professional

I am currently VP Product Development at Tucows Inc.

I  worked at ATI previously, where I was director of software development programs in the PC graphics technology department.

Before ATI, I was VP Engineering at TrueSpectra until November 2004 after we were acquired by Scene7. I'd been with the company since June 2000. We built software that makes image delivery over the Web much more powerful and efficient.

I ran the engineering department in Toronto and was responsible for:

Our clients include Sears Canada, Blockbuster, Macy's and Lowes. For the tech savvy, have a look at the catalog images on their sites and you will see query strings appended to the URL's. These query strings tell our server what to do with the images (resize, twist, compress, add a drop shadow, etc...) For more information on how this actually works, go to the demonstration off our main web page. Don't forget to check out the video of our coverage by Business Now.

Before TrueSpectra, I was at Alias|Wavefront  for 7 years where I responsible for various projects including:

Previous to Alias|Wavefront, I was co-founder and CTO of my own company, Studio Base 2. We developed rendering products for PC's, Macs and Unix. We sold the company to Abvent in 1990 and Abvent continues to sell the Studio Base 2 product line as its Art*lantis product family.

Volunteer Activities

I have been involved as a volunteer at ACM/SIGGRAPH for over ten years.

I started out by becoming a member of the Paris SIGGRAPH chapter in 1987, then volunteered to help set up a mailing list.

In 1991 I was elected chair of the chapter and was appointed to the SIGGRAPH local groups steering committee.

In 1993 I was appointed director for chapters at ACM , the ACM/SIGGRAPH parent organization. I served on the Local Activities Board and on the SIG Governing Board as liaison between the two entities. The Local Activities Board was responsible for chapter oversight and the SIG Governing Board was responsible for all of the Special Interest Groups at ACM

In 1995 I was elected to the position of ACM/SIGGRAPH vice chair. I continued in that role through 1999.

I also served as International Committee Chair for the 1997 SIGGRAPH conference and did so again for the 2001 conference.

In 1999 I was elected to the position of SIG Governing Board Executive Committee Vice Chair of Operations.

In 2000 I was elected to the position of Chair and in that capacity sat on the ACM Executive Committee and Council.

I was ACM/SIGGRAPH president from July 2002 through June 2005 and currently serve on the executive committee as immediate past president through 2008. I also serve on ACM council.

UNIS Classmates

My sisters and I have been working to establish a link between alumni of the United Nations International School that we attended in New York. We've set up a general list at Yahoo for all UNIS alumni. This can be found here.

I have also set up a group specifically for my class: the class of 1974.