Lead what's yours to command.

Hans Bathija

Disruption isn't new to my family. My family worked in photofinishing and owned a video store. We witnesssed digital photography and streaming end both. In 2005, as Academic Head of a digital animation program in New Delhi, I led a program built around Maya at the exact moment CGI was ending hand-drawn 2D animation as a viable craft — and today I'm watching AI do the same thing to CGI. I now work alongside Alain Chesnais at SIGGRAPH Toronto — director of engineering on the original Maya project, and a past president of both ACM and ACM SIGGRAPH — closing a loop that started in that New Delhi classroom. Punch cards, DOS, the internet, AI — I've watched this pattern for forty years, and more often than not, from the losing side of it before finding a way through.

Discipline is something I've built from more than one direction: coaching hockey, training as a boxer, years of competitive ballroom and rhythm dance, and years working alongside military and police, where the stakes for holding steady were real. A political science background first pointed me toward how institutions, and people, actually respond to upheaval. I'm also a husband and a father of two, which keeps all of this honest.

This program isn't built on theory about what AI might do. It's built on having watched a family, and an industry, get disrupted and adapt — more than once. Most of what unsettles us was never actually ours to control. The only real question is what you do next.