William H. Jepson

Director, Urban Simulation Laboratory
Department of Architecture and Urban Design
School of Arts and Architecture
University of California, Los Angeles

Bill Jepson is the Director and Founder of the UCLA Urban Simulation Laboratory
which is located in the Department of Architecture and Urban Design,
in the School of Arts and Architecture. The Urban Simulation Lab is a
multi-million dollar distributed computing facility which comprises over
twenty high performance workstations. These include three Silicon Graphics Onyx and
Onyx/2 Infinite Reality workstations.

Bill was honored with the 1994 Computerworld/Smithsonian award in the
education and academia category. The award, considered as one of the
industries most prestigious, recognizes information technology that best
serves the needs of society. Bill's work is included in the permanent
archives of the Smithsonian American History Museum. In 1999 Bill was named by Silicon Graphics as one of eight founding "Vanguards of Visual Computing". This program is a pan-industry forum of scientific and creative leaders dedicated to advancing their respective industries through visual computing.

Bill is currently directing the creation of the Virtual Los Angeles Project.
This project is actively creating a Virtual Reality model of the entire Los Angeles Basin,
which is accurate to the level of the signs in the windows and graffiti on
the walls. Bill has been awarded numerous grants and contracts from the National
Science Foundation, the City of Los Angeles Housing Department,
the City of Los Angeles' Mayor's Office, Mirage Resorts, Los Angeles World
Airports, the MTA, Maguire Partners, Arba Development Group, the Hollywood
Business Improvement District and the Getty Education Institute.

Bill's research interest areas include: real-time simulation,
virtual-reality, computer aided architectural design, advanced computer
graphics and visualization; architectural database design and the utilization
of advanced programming tools and methods in computing.