Michael Kass is a senior distinguished engineer at NVIDIA and the overall software architect of NVIDIA Omniverse, NVIDIA's platform for collaborative 3D content creation and digital twins. In 2005, Kass received a Scientific and Technical Academy Award for “pioneering work in physically-based computer-generated techniques used to simulate realistic cloth in motion pictures.” In 2009, he received the ACM Computer Graphics Achievement Award for "his extensive and significant contributions to computer graphics, ranging from image processing to animation to modeling and in particular for his introduction of optimization techniques as a fundamental tool in graphics." And in 2017, the ACM honored him as an ACM Fellow “for contributions to computer vision and computer graphics, particularly optimization and simulation.” Kass has been granted over 30 U.S. patents, and was honored in 2018 as Inventor of the Year by the NY Intellectual Property Law Association. Before switching to computer graphics, he had an extensive career in computer vision. His Helmholtz-award winning computer vision paper “Snakes: Active contour models” is one of the most cited papers in computer science with over 25,000 citations. Kass holds a B.A. from Princeton, an M.S. from M.I.T. and a Ph.D. from Stanford.