Brennan Shacklett

I am a 4th year Ph.D. student at Stanford University advised by Kayvon Fatahalian. My work revolves around designing graphics systems from the ground up for the new domain of training AI-based agents. Learning complex tasks requires agents to perform millions of simulated actions in virtual environments, presenting a challenging graphics workload with significant impact to research iteration times and accessibility. My current research focuses on evolving game engine and renderer architecture to enable high-throughput, GPU-accelerated simulation of thousands of learning environments simultaneously across a wide range of tasks. In the past, I've also worked on real-time image reconstruction techniques and debugging tools for hardware design. Prior to beginning my Ph.D., I received my B.S. and M.S. in Systems, also from Stanford University.

Publications

Projects

Teaching & Industry Experience

6/23 - 9/23

Research Associate at Treyarch / Activision Central Technology

Exploring game development applications of rapid agent training.

6/21 - 9/21

Research Intern in the Intelligent Systems Lab at Intel

Working on 3D simulation and rendering for reinforcement learning and robotics under Vladlen Koltun.

4/19 - 6/19, 4/20 - 6/20

Head Course Assistant for CS348B: Image Synthesis Techniques

Developed new assignments and assisted students. Class taught by Pat Hanrahan and Matt Pharr.

6/19 - 9/19

Research Intern in the Real-Time Rendering group at NVIDIA Research

Worked with Marco Salvi on image supersampling techniques (DLSS) under Aaron Lefohn.

6/16 - 9/16

Research Intern in the Video Compression group at Mozilla Research

Improved performance of the AV1 rate-distortion optimizer under Tim Terriberry.