Kim ’01 Awarded Again For Technical Achievement

said. “It’s 435 independent contractors, each with significant egos and each with significant purpose. And each with relatively thin skin and a big, big megaphone.”

Recalling his own experience voting on bills during the COVID-19 pandemic, Upton then pointed out that representatives often did not encounter each other for long periods of time due to proxy voting, which impacted personal relationships and isolated members. Republicans have since eliminated proxy voting — in which representatives had the ability to authorize another representative to vote on their behalf based on specific instructions — after gaining control over the House in the 2022 midterm elections.

By MARIAN CABALLO Sun Assistant News Editor

From Hogwarts’s sorting hat to Buzz Lightyear’s spacesuit, Theodore Kim ’01 has helped bring iconic creations to life on the big screen. A former computer science undergraduate and postdoctoral associate at Cornell, Kim received his second Technical Achievement award from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences at the Feb. 24 SciTech award ceremony in Los Angeles.

Business Manager Katie Chen ’25 ties prior to leaving office.

“So many members are motivated by these different forces that don’t have anything actually to do with legislative progress. They have to do with, how many retweets did you get? How many small-dollar donations?” Rose said. “There are these weird, perverse incentives pushing people along each and every day. You don’t get on TV for passing bold legislation nearly enough. You get on TV for dividing, for saying things that are incendiary.”

However, Rose went on to highlight Congress’s bipartisanship in recent years, though he hedged his statements by saying that congressional business often revolves around personal politics and relationships.

“[Politics] isn’t a normal business where people ‘get it,’” Rose

“The last vote that I cast was to keep the government open on Dec. 27 with a couple of trillion dollars, because it is called the omnibus appropriation bill,” Upton said. “More than half of my colleagues who voted… on that bill voted by proxy. They weren’t there in person, because [proxy voting] was allowed because of COVID.”

Following the moderated portion of the lecture, Upton and Rose answered questions from the audience on a variety of topics — ranging from how to bring people on both ends of the political spectrum together, to the barriers that they have seen affecting female and minority members of Congress, to questions about their staffers.

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Kim, now an associate professor of computer science at Yale University, was awarded alongside former Pixar Animated Studios collaborators David Eberle, Fernando de Goes and Audrey Wong for designing and developing the Fizt2 elastic simulation system.

Fizt2 — which stands for “physics tool version 2.0,” according to Kim — is an improved iteration of an earlier Pixar program called Fizt, a physics-based cloth simulator co-developed by David Baraff Ph.D. ’92. Fizt2 was developed to model the dynamics of clothing and other soft materials with more complexity, making animations believable in situations that deviate from reality.

“If you only simulate the clothing of characters [with Fizt], and the animator is given control of the body, the animator can do all sorts of things with the body that actually can’t happen in real life,” Kim said.

Defying the laws of physics in a physics-based simulator, however, causes some undesired outcomes.

“[Animators] would then try to push those animated characters through the cloth simulator, and a lot of times it would just explode. The physics simulator starts to work against you,” Kim said. Among various improvements, Kim specifically helped incorporate volume simulation capabilities into Fizt2. According to Kim, volume simulation helps Fizt2 realistically model complex interactions between objects like fingers and cloth, especially in difficult situations where parts of animated characters self-intersect. This technology assists animators like Wong, one of Kim’s fellow honorees and Fizt2 co-developers, in more efficiently exercising creativity and physical realism. According to Kim, before Fizt2, Wong would have to go back to her animation and fix the cloth by hand.

Unlike those receiving other Academy Awards, projects receiving scientific and technical honors can be developed in years prior. Winning projects must demonstrate significant contributions to the movie-making process. From Woody’s pull string in “Toy Story 4” to flowy skirts in “Coco,” Kim’s technology has been used to enhance realism in many recent popular animated movies — including “Cars 3,” “Turning Red,” “Onward,” “Lightyear” and “Incredibles 2.”

“We went out [to Los Angeles] last April to present to the Science and Technology council what our contribution [to the moviemaking process] is,” Kim said, noting that the team started work on the project in 2015. “Our technology was used in nine movies before we even applied.”

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