I'm Alain Galvan, a software engineer at AMD working in the Ray Tracing Driver team. I'm originally from the Dominican Republic, lived in New York, and am currently in the rural outskirts of northern West Palm Beach, Florida. Throughout my life I've maintained a love of solving practical visualization problems and understanding every aspect of computer graphics.
I focus on high-performance GPGPU computing, ray tracing or raster/compute techniques, and cross-vendor rendering. I have a deep passion for computer graphics, be reading/authoring research papers, chapters, and articles on the subject, designing libraries and tools to help solve challenging rendering problems, or teaching through interactive articles and vlogs.
I believe in being humbly curious, independent and connected, that we're standing atop giants and thus have a responsibility to future, and the power of dialectic critique.
AMD Radeon Technologies Group
November 2021 - Present · 4 years
Orlando, Florida, United States · Remote
Marmoset Toolbag 4
June 2017 - November 2021 · 4 years
Ames, Iowa, United States · Remote
FIU Natural User Interface Laboratory
June 2014 - June 2017 · 3 years
Miami, Florida, United States
FIU Computing and Information Sciences
August 2012 - December 2016 · 4 years
Miami, Florida, United States
University of Notre Dame
April 2026 - April 2026 · 1 day
South Bend, Indiana, USA
High Performance Graphics
June 2025 - June 2025 · 3 days
Copenhagen, Denmark
High Performance Graphics
July 2024 - July 2024 · 2 days
Denver, Colorado, USA
i3D
May 2024 - May 2024 · 2 days
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA
A lot of people from students to engineers and professors inspire me, in no particular order: Alan Wolfe, Francisco R. Ortega, Bartosz Ciechanowski, Yining Karl Li, Benedikt Bitterli, Nate Morrical, Omar Shehata. In addition, I put a few in this blog post and maintain X list of folks.
My hobbies include digital painting, 3D modeling, piano, guitar, photography, espresso, films, and farming.
In no particular order:
Programming Massively Parallel Processors
By Wen-mei W. Hwu, David B. Kirk, Izzat El Hajj
Game Engine Architecture
By Jason Gregory
Physically Based Rendering
By Matt Pharr, Wenzel Jakob, and Greg Humphreys
Real Time Rendering
By Tomas Akenine-Möller et al.
The Graphics Codex
By Morgan McGuire
Ray Tracing Gems Series
By Eric Hanes, et al.
Geometric Tools for Computer Graphics
By Philip J. Schneider, David H. Eberly
Ray Tracing in One Weekend
By Peter Shirley et al.
The Rust Programming Language
By Steve Klabnik et al.
Fundamentals of Computer Graphics 5th Edition
By Steve Marschner and Peter Shirley
The GPU Gems Series
By many authors
Deep Learning
By Ian Goodfellow et al.
Thanks for Reading!