ETH Life: Mr. Gross, a personal question to kick off: what is your association with Disney?

Markus Gross: Oh, I more or less grew up with Mickey Mouse and the comics were part of my life right up until I went university. The inventor Gyros Gearloose always fascinated me in particular. He was my absolute favorite character! In a manner of speaking, he was my inspiration for doing an engineering degree.

The venerable ETH Zurich and Mickey Mouse: at first glance something of an unlikely couple to say the least. How did the partnership come about? Who made the first move?

As with many encounters that blossom into something bigger, it is difficult to say in retrospect. The fact that I have had good contacts with employees at Disney for many years will certainly have been a factor. There are researchers and managers there whom I have come to know and respect over the years. At some point, however, it was suggested that this could lead to more. And fortunately ETH Zurich’s management and Department of Computational Science jumped at the chance.

ETH Zurich is the first university to work with Disney, it is not?

Yes, that’s right. There isn’t a comparable collaboration of this scale in Europe. Of course, the fact that the partnership has come off at all speaks volumes for ETH Zurich and our excellent international position in the information technology sector. You have to consider that while Disney is admittedly a theme-centered entertainment concern, the entertainment is based on highly sophisticated technical components. Their film animations are becoming increasingly more ambitious, the theme parks more and more technological and ESPN, the sports channel, presenting more and more with the aid of computers – in short, highly advanced technology is needed across the board.

What is it that makes ETH Zurich so attractive for Disney?

The most important thing is arguably the brain pool we can offer here. The critical mass of talent and expertise we have at our fingertips at ETH Zurich, not only in terms of computer animation and visual computing but also in other areas of computational science, like machine learning, artificial intelligence and robotics, is very broad. The breadth and depth of the knowledge we can offer at ETH Zurich is rare, even among top-flight universities.

What can ETH Zurich bring to the table that its competitors in the US cannot?

Apart from specialist expertise, I think that we also offer excellent parameters. For example, comparatively speaking ETH Zurich is extremely flexible when it comes to organizing collaborative projects. Moreover, Zurich is particularly attractive for a concern like Disney that is currently looking to establish its first European research location because of Zurich’s central location in Europe. Incidentally, Walt Disney is also setting up another research laboratory with Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, USA.

And what is it about Disney that makes it so attractive for ETH Zurich?

Disney is of course much more than just Mickey Mouse; it is a holding company spanning a great number of business areas. Starting with ESPN, the world’s largest sports channel, right through to the Games Studios, Imagineering, Disney Animation and the Live Action Studios, Disney is a globally unique company where we find a complete array of highly interesting problems for our research. It is these high-quality problems that present a great deal of potential for applied research. Then there is the access to databases that are unique the world over. The Animation Studios have an exceptional archive of artwork from past films that we can use for analysis. And ESPN has approximately 1.9 million sports videos that have to be archived and processed. Such volumes of data are extremely exciting for IT-related issues.

Have the focuses of the research collaboration already been defined?

In Zurich, one of the focal points will be 3-D computer animation. New technologies for film production will constitute a second core theme, which entails combining cinematographic rules with computer-based film production in order to generate better special effects. A third area is also bound to be computer image generation, for example physically-generated simulations. These are also the areas where we have developed our certain experience and expertise in the Laboratory for Computing and Computer Graphics. In the longer term, however, artificial intelligence and robotics are also set to become an additional focus, also areas where ETH Zurich has a lot to offer.

And what is the current progress of the collaboration between Disney and ETH Zurich?

In conjunction with Disney, we are currently recruiting researchers from all over the world who are suitable for Disney Research in Zurich. We have already appointed three senior researchers and five to seven more are expected to follow. At the same time, we have started defining appropriate research projects with individual business units from Disney. We also have two ETH Zurich students already, who are writing papers at Disney Research, and we have appointed the first PhD students within the scope of the research collaboration. Consequently, the lab is constantly being expanded. Disney pays for all recruitments while ETH Zurich provides the CLW building next to the computational science building – for a modest fee, of course. In all, Disney Research in Zurich will consist of about 20 people. At the same time, 4 PhD posts will be half financed by Disney and half by the Department of Computational Science.

So how will issues of intellectual property be regulated?

ETH Zurich has clear and simple regulations for other cooperative projects that we would also like to adopt here: all intellectual accomplishments that are achieved by an institution alone belong to the institution itself; for joint accomplishments, however, the intellectual property is owned jointly by Disney and ETH Zurich.

Does this all mean we will soon be reading ‘Special effects by Walt Disney and ETH Zurich’ in the end credits to “Pirates of the Caribbean IV”?

Who knows? In principle, something like that might be conceivable in the longer term. After all, one of the aims of Disney Research in Zurich is to implement research results in such a way that they be practically viable and can flow into Disney productions.

Industrial partnership ETH Zurich and Walt Disney

ETH Zurich is embarking on an industrial partnership with Walt Disney that will last for at least five years. “Disney Research” in Zurich, as the new lab will be known, will commence operations in the fall. In the medium term, up to 20 researchers will be working at the newly established lab in the confines of ETH Zurich. Markus Gross, ETH Zurich Professor from the Department of Computational Science, has been appointed director.
Developing the next generation of technologies requires the cooperation of leading universities, explains Ed Catmull, President of Pixar Animation Studios, which belongs to the Walt Disney Company. According to Peter Chen, Vice-President Research at ETH Zurich, being chosen as the sole location in Europe shows “that ETH Zurich is highly regarded internationally for the quality of its research, particularly in terms of IT and visual computing.”