He received his M.S. and Ph.D. in Computer Science from U.C. Berkeley in 1995 and 1998 and his Diplom from Karlsruhe University in 1993. Prior to NYU he was on the faculty at Stanford University and worked for several companies including Hewlett Packard, Interval, Disney Feature Animation, and LucasFilm's ILM. He was named Stanford Joyce Faculty Fellow and Terman Fellow in 1999. He received the Olympus Prize for achievements in computer vision and AI in 2002, and was named a Sloan Research Fellow in 2003. He was the chair for the SIGGRAPH 2004 Electronic Theater and Computer Animation Festival. At CVPR 2008 he was awarded the IEEE Longuet-Higgins Prize for "Fundamental Contributions in Computer Vision that have withstood the test of time".