Imagine Woody with Andy’s name on the bottom of his boot— a symbol of the bond between a boy and his toy. For years, we’ve felt a similar connection to characters like him, but always from a distance, as spectators.

While video games have promised us the chance to interact with characters, they’ve fallen short in creating truly believable behavior. At Pixar, it can take an artist a full week to animate just one second of a character’s movement. And when the goal is for that character to react to anything, in real time, this approach simply does not scale.

Artificial Intelligence has created the potential to finally be able to leave your own mark on these characters. I’m excited about teaching computers to skillfully communicate in audio and video modalities in ways we’ve never dreamt of!

Hello! My name is Alonso Martinez, and ever since I was a child, I've been passionate about creating imaginary characters. Over a decade at Pixar Animation Studios, I contributed to Academy Award-winning movies like “Up”, “Inside Out”, and “Coco”, working in Character Modeling, Rigging, Art, Animation, and Research.

Beyond Pixar, my interest in interactive characters led me to develop two robots, Mira and Gertie. Realizing that the key to great characters lies in their 'intelligence', I joined Google Research where I led research teams exploring creating next generation interactive characters using AI techniques such as Reinforcement Learning and Generative Models.

Currently I am a M.S. Computer Vision student in the EECS (BAIR lab) at Berkeley and advised by Alyosha Efros.