A decade ago Steve Sullivan was a research assistant at the Beckman Institute on the lookout for job opportunities when he decided against a career in academia or one of the traditional industry outlets for an engineer with a brand new Ph.D. Instead, he chose to go to Hollywood.

As an electrical engineer, Sullivan’s dreams of making it in the movie business differed from the standard Hollywood formula. Sullivan wanted to work behind the camera and knew the computer vision techniques he focused on at Beckman could provide real- world solutions to moviemakers who in the 1990s were grappling with how to apply new digital technologies to some of the problems inherent in traditional filmmaking.

But like many a Tinsel Town dreamer, Sullivan was hit with a spark of inspiration emanating from the screen. He was wa t c hing a TV documentary about the making of Jurassic Park and instantly realized that computer vision techniques could replace the laborious and restrictive camera location methods the show was describing for creating special effects.

“It was talking about how movies have this problem of matchmoving and figuring out where the cameras were and objects were and that is computer vision,” Sullivan said.

Sullivan began talking to people in the industry and telling them about computer vision techniques that could solve special effects problems. In 1996 he landed a job with a graphics company in Los Angeles called Rhythm and Hues that did work for the movies.

“So that’s how I got into the industry.” Sullivan said. “I was applying exactly those things that had I wo r ked on at Beckman.”

But his dream job was to work at George Lucas’ famed special effects company Industrial Light and Magic, located in northern California. That desire was realized in 1998 and since then the Beckman alumnus has been, well, living large: winner of an Academy Award for technical achievement, soon-to-be White House honoree, and, oh yes, recipient of a kiss from actress Charlize Theron.

Not the usual perks for someone with a Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of Illinois. But then Sullivan is not your typical electrical engineer, according to Jean Ponce of the Artificial Intelligence group. Ponce served as teacher, academic advisor and mentor to Sulliva n when he worked in Ponce’s Computer Vision and Robotics group at Beckman.

“He was this kid from Missouri with a funny haircut. But he wanted to do something with himself,” Ponce said.

Ponce said ambition wasn’t the only thing that separated Sullivan from his peers.

“Steve was an interesting guy, and a fun person as well,” he said. “He had a gift for person-to-person relationships that I think is rare for a Ph.D. student because they focus on their work. But Steve had other interests.”

Sullivan’s early graduate studies were in areas like medical imaging and robotics before later focusing on topics such as image-based modeling and 3-D tracking that would play a role in his future career. He joined Industrial Light and Magic just as the movie industry was looking to incorporate the kind of computer vision techniques he learned as a research assistant for Ponce.

At that time, computers had widely been used to create special effects. But the mov i emaking process was still hampered by the age-old methods of calculating camera angles and positions by hand, while filming the effects separately from the rest of the film and then integrating them, sometimes clumsily, into the movie.