Steve Demers

Director of Research

Steve has been a successful problem solver and team-builder in a wide variety of fields. He has built machine learning and R&D teams from scratch that have produced award-winning results. As a principal at a management consulting company, he has advised Fortune 500 companies on their sales pipelines, marketing decisions, and large capital expenditures (over $1 billion), often creating new machine learning pipelines to guide the decision-making. As the lead scientist at a successful neuroscience startup he helped build and guide the science team and was the principal designer of techniques to derive control schemes from neurobiological signals (via machine-learning, signal processing, hardware design, etc.) that have resulted in numerous patents. At Caltech he was involved with computational physics problems involving different research groups such as photovoltaics, 3D printing, simulating high velocity impacts, and designing metal nanolattice metamaterials, developing novel workflows to handle each, often in conjunction with large industry partners. In his movie career he led large teams that developed practical solutions to both finish projects on time as well as achieve an artistic goal – typically wildly divergent targets. He was a principle developer of the ‘Bullet- Time’ effect for ‘The Matrix’ as well as the ‘skin’ for Gollum on ‘Lord of the Rings’ both of which led to industry-standard practices to this day (as well as two Technical Achievement Oscars).