Karl Willis
Senior Manager, Applied Science at Adobe
San Francisco, California, United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolKarl Willis is a senior research manager and Head of Model Operations at Autodesk with 18 years of experience bridging academic rigor and product delivery in computational design and AI. He founded and leads model delivery and operations teams at Autodesk, translating research prototypes from his PhD work into scalable production systems for design and engineering workflows. Karl’s background spans research roles at Disney Research and Microsoft, startup product leadership (including a VP role at a 3D-printing electronics company), and founding a design-focused startup, giving him rare fluency across research, product, and manufacturing domains. Based in San Francisco, he combines deep technical training with pragmatic leadership, often surfacing unexpected insights about design–AI integration drawn from hands-on prototyping and cross-disciplinary collaboration.
18 years of coding experience
11 years of employment as a software developer
UNSW SydneyBachelor of Computer Graphic Design Time Based Media, Bachelor of Computer Graphic Design Time Based Media at Wanganui School of DesignDoctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.) Computational Design, Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.) Computational Design at Carnegie Mellon UniversityMaster of Design Product Design, Master of Design Product Design at University of Tsukuba
Japanese, English
Github Skills (56)
openscad10
windows10
linux10
drawing10
java10
siggraph10
fusion10
data-tools10
3d10
structure-from-motion10
3d-reconstruction10
point-cloud9
ssdp9
pythonocc9
graph-neural-network8
Programming languages (5)
Github contributions (5)
karldd/Alchemy
Oct 2007 - Oct 2018
An open drawing project
Contributions:552 commits, 2 PRs, 19 pushes in 11 years 2 months
drawingjavadesktop-appmacosxwindows
AutodeskAILab/Fusion360GalleryDataset
Mar 2020 - Apr 2022
Data, tools, and documentation of the Fusion 360 Gallery Dataset
Contributions:4 reviews, 422 commits, 17 PRs in 2 years 1 month
structure-from-motiondataset3d-reconstructionfusionsiggraph
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