About

I'm Jim McCann. This is TCHOW, where (attempt to) I document many of the things that I do.

Research

I used to be a graduate student in the Carnegie Mellon Graphics Lab. My Carnegie Mellon research projects are documented on my research web page.

In July 2010, I defended my thesis. It was a fun thesis defense; there were both "Applause" and "Laughter" signs, pink hair, lab coats, and plenty of baked goods. (Credit for much of that is owed Ronit.) In September, I turned in the final copy of my dissertation.

I then spent time as a postdoctoral researcher at Adobe, where I (among other things) to created this interpolate extension.

From October of 2012 to February of 2014 I worked full-time on creating video games as TCHOW llc (though I remained a collaborator on a few research projects). This resulted in the commercial release of Rktcr, a Linux/OSX/Windows game, and Rainbow, an iOS/Android game.

From February 2014 until May 2017, I worked as an Associate Research Scientist at Disney Research Pittsburgh. It was a heck of a lot of fun.

Since May 2017, I have been a Professor with the Carnegie Mellon University Robotics Institute. This means I do things like advise PhD students, teach classes, and create new knowledge; check out my academic home page for that sort of thing.

I continue to work on games as a hobby, but at a much slower rate than I would otherwise like.

Contact

I'm quite widely contactable. Consider:

• IM: I'm mainly on Google Chat these days -- ix at tchow.com.
• Chat: I'm @ix on the tchow discord server (invite link).
• EMail: ix at tchow.com is, again, your best bet. But I'm also likely to respond to jmccann at [cs.cmu.edu or umich.edu] or try ix at [cmu.edu or umich.edu].

See Also

• For federated character-limited witticisms, see @ix@social.wub.site.
• I very infrequently use my account 1x on Twitter.
• For my music, head to Shout Horse. (Or try my old soundcloud.)
• For music with my brother, head to Shout Horse. (Or try our old soundcloud or last.fm page or Spotify.)

TCHOW

People often ask why my web page is called TCHOW (also, tchow, if the capitals become too glaring). The name comes from "The Chicken's House of Wacky" -- which is a fictional organization (designed by myself) that was useful to me during my formative middle- and high- school years. The mascot of the group was, of course, the Chicken, a comic character resembling death (and some far side cartoons, though not intentionally).

Very little of the original moral content of the group remains, but I keep the name (and, occasionally, the handle Chicken1, though I am more often, now, using ix).

'ix', by the way, is not a reference to one of Mallarmé's pseudonyms. It is simply a nice, snappy, and short name.