Academy Software Foundation Technical Advisory Council (TAC) Meeting - April 30, 2025

Join the meeting at https://zoom-lfx.platform.linuxfoundation.org/meeting/97880950229?password=81d2940e-c055-43b9-9b5a-6cd7d7090feb

Voting Representative Attendees

Premier Member Representatives

Project Representatives

Carol Payne - Diversity & Inclusion Working Group / OpenColorIO Representative
Cary Phillips - OpenEXR Representative
Chris Kulla - Open Shading Language Representative
Diego Tavares Da Silva - OpenCue Representative
Jonathan Stone - MaterialX Representative
Ken Museth - OpenVDB Representative

Industry Representatives

Jean-Francois Panisset - Visual Effects Society

Non-Voting Attendees

Non-Voting Project and Working Group Representatives

LF Staff

David Morin - Academy Software Foundation
Emily Olin - Academy Software Foundation
John Mertic - The Linux Foundation
Michelle Roth - The Linux Foundation
Yarille Ortiz - The Linux Foundation

Other Attendees

Eric Reineke, Netflix / OTIO
Alyssa Alexis, SIGGRAPH
Jim Helman, MovieLabs
JT Nelson, Pasadena Open Source consortium / SoCal Blender group
Karen Ruggles, DeSales University / D&I WG
Lee Kerley, Apple
Lorna Dumba, Framestore
Maxwell Iverson, Sony Imageworks
Olga Avramenko, Sony Imageworks
Rebecca Bever, Walt Disney Animation
Rob Rowe, Cinepaint
Spencer Stephens, ZeroTrust WG

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Agenda

General Updates
- Dev Days - May 15, 2025 #966
- OpenQMC #434
- SLP Volunteer Opportunities #992
- Rename project lifecycle stage ‘Adopted’ to ‘Graduated’ #999
- DigiPro CFP closes 5/16 #1003
- Open Source Days 2025 #1005
- Add question for resources to project proposal #1024
- Propose to remove vote for annual reviews #1016
New Working Group Proposal - Machine Learning #1029
Planning Session for TAC #972

Notes

General Updates
- Dev Days - May 15, 2025 #966
  - Carol: Ofifce sessions are be recorded
  - Project and company leads, please follow up on requests, encourage engineers to contribute, and projects to be ready
  - Olga: Office hours next Tuesday, then 1AM and 1PM PST
  - On Monday we will focus on builds, will be good if you can be there to answer questions
  - Will post to project leads Slack, it’s also in Confluence
- OpenQMC #434
- SLP Volunteer Opportunities #992
  - Carol: some things have passed and can no longer volunteer for them. Applications have closed, mentors being assigned. SLP members starting to join Slack, please send them a welcome.
  - Karen: we’re excited to have our final 20 as of this morning, they have filled out CoC form. If you want to mentor, please use the link, application reviewers is past, but team leads, speakers, still a small window.
  - SLP Volunteer Application
  - Karen (chat): final call for mentors and Team Leads(definitely do this soon if you want to be a mentor). Guest mentor, Speaker finalize soon as well! Thank you all!
- Disney TAC Rep
  - Rebecca Bever at WDAS is new member, was previously at Marvel / Live Action. Connected with Corey, excited to be here. Had some involvement with ASWF a few years ago.
- Rename project lifecycle stage ‘Adopted’ to ‘Graduated’ #999
- DigiPro CFP closes 5/16 #1003
- Open Source Days 2025 #1005
  - CFP runs for another couple of weeks
  - Sign up for town halls
  - Let us know if you want to have a BoF.
  - Opportunity to do SIGGRAPH Labs, so if a project wants to do a hands on course, can do the introduction
- Add question for resources to project proposal #1024
  - Add question about project resources, “what existing maintainers / contributors does the project already have”
  - TAC wants projects to come in with existing resources
  - Please add any comments to the PR
- Propose to remove vote for annual reviews #1016
  - While doing votes for annual reviews is good, can be hard to chase down quorum. So the idea is not to have to vote, otherwise the TAC can vote on archiving the project. Please comment on the PR.
  - Larry: if you are TAC members, you have a responsibility to speak up if you think a project is in trouble / not getting resources / has disfunction, want to avoid having to go through the motion of a vote, but don’t hesitate if you see something where a project may be floundering, say something to the TAC.
  - John: Larry Carol and I are working on additional Best Practices and Learnings to share with the TSCs, may have TAC session about this.
New Working Group Proposal - Machine Learning #1029
- Presentation by Larry
- Proposal: Working group on Machine Learning
  - Talked about this a long time ago, wasn’t clear who would step forward
- The Troubles
  - Nobody knows what to build
  - Nobody knows how or where to talk about it
  - Hype and anxiety at every turn
  - Tech companies control the narrative, who may not have our best interests at heart
  - Is there a leadership role for ASWF to play?
    - Discussion after Open Source Days
- What is ML anyway?
  - Tools that use statistical techniques or by-example training to implement features that are resistant to traditional programming or step-by-step algorithms
- Hypotheses
  - We need a positive vision to rally behind
  - We need a lot of common tools & infrastructure
    - OSF poll revealed many common needs
      - Major studios / companies have had the same ideas as each other
    - Non-differentiating – nobody benefits from all separately building roughly the same thing
    - So let’s at least do these things together
    - Leave more time for the bespoke / differentiating work
- WG Goals
  - Plan and spin off ASWF projects that use ML in artist-serving ways
  - Community and communications channels to share information and expertise
  - Leadership: proactively and visibly work for a positive, productive, ethical direction for ML-based tools that help artists and productions
  - Counter the endless external noise of hype + anxiety
- Non Goals
  - No doomerism or boosterism
  - No philosophizing or navel gazing about “AI”
  - No issues or politics outside of the film industry
  - No interest in tools that take creative control or satisfying work away from artists
  - No getting distracted by topics or projects we can’t rally dedicated resources behind
- Initial deliverables
  - Communications channels, get people talking
  - Spin out at least one sandbox project immediately
    - Ambitious goal: a demo-able MVP by SIGGRAPH
  - One or more additional projects underway within 2025
    - Use WG-ML meetings to pitch, do match-making
- Current Status
  - Enthusiasm & discussion
    - ILM, Sony, WETA, Disney, Framestore, Autodesk
  - First project chosen (proposal coming soon)
    - ILM & Sony already committed to participate with engineering
  - Several other projects in discussion
  - Let’s bring this all into the light - join us!
- Questions / discussion
  - Ken: excellent idea, want to emphasize there are already activities, like OpenVDB (ML extension for PyTorch). Larry: don’t think it’s a conflict, if a project is already doing something, it should just run with it, may be outside the scope of the WG, but would like to benefit from expertise.
  - Gordon: Autodesk is keen to be part, one aspect is understanding how we handle the data behind all this, what can be common, what needs to be studio specific. Very timely and like how the intent is framed.
  - David: Sci-Tech Awards were awarded for ML-based denoisers. There’s been a lot of activity in different studios, we are past the pioneering times, it’s time to organize.
  - Larry: hope we get a lot of participation, some companies want to work in these areas but not sure what they can “step into”. Hopefully this can help focus engineers, start building expertise, instead of a single company “sticking their neck out”. ASWF has mind share and confidence of our industry, so we should be taken seriously.
  - JF: do we need infrastructure for running AI workloads? Larry: project we chose to work on will determine what else is needed to run on.
  - John: will take to LFX vote.
  - Larry: hope to pass this quickly so we can set up communication channels and can present project at next TAC meeting.
Planning Session for TAC #972
- David to run PollEV Poll
- Can anybody vote? Larry: we didn’t consider that, but yes! Carol: yes! Larry: anyone attending this meeting is relevant!
- JF: hard to choose at this point! They are all good
- Carol: these are priorities for 2025, so think about time sensitive things, these are all good and we want them all, but agendas get filled quickly.
- Top 3:
  - Identify opportunities to coordinate efforts between projects - 14
  - Having project sharing interesting l earnings, or topics relevant to other projects, during TAC meetings - 10
  - Prioritized view of open source gaps / opportunities for studios - 10
- Larry: if you voted for something because you have a concrete idea… but we will look at this chart and try to execute on it.
- Opportunities to coordinate: what are we currently missing?
  - Wave: DPEL is an obvious one, people looking for coverage of assets. There is “money left on the table”, we want to make sure that “OTIO can read a bunch of EXRs”, don’t know if people are talking about this in other meetings. Have conversations between USD Assets and DPEL, but what about others?
  - Larry: early in this meeting John made mention of Best Practices, it’s been a while since we’ve talked about expectations of the projects, how should TSC run, how should the TAC run. There has been a lot of turnover since then, TSCs have advanced their knowledge. So sharing those learnings could fall under this.
  - Carol: perhaps more opportunities for cross project coordination, come in and talk about color management in more detail than during the project review.
  - Matthew: notion of a “canary project”, MaterialX + USD for instance, if we can find something that can help with basic smoke testing, figure out version compatibility…
  - Larry: that idea would be a real service, may belong under CI WG, but CI WG needs some “love”, last 2 meetings has been small attendance. It’s getting sparse, we used to have better attendance. It’s mostly JF carrying a lot of the load. The work that WG is doing is an important part of the infrastructure used by the projects, and even beyond ASWF. SIGGRAPH meetings talk about using those containers, don’t want to see this fall into disrepair. If you care about the CI system and the tooling around it, put some time and effort into this WG. Does a lot for us in a “low key” way.
  - JF: liked the example of the presentation from OpenVDB to switch from PyBind11 to NanoBind
  - John: much easier to prepare for a 5 minute presentation. Larry: maybe we can make a special kind in the TAC repo, a “lightning talk”, keep room for a couple of those in a meeting. I bet each project has some nuggets that others can learn from.
  - John: some of these get buried in project channels. Will add a task for myself to put these together.
John: OpenImageIO and OpenLensIO coming up, working to schedule the Open Source Technology Improvement Fund folks, pending on issues and disclosures which will trigger the final report. OpenCue and CI WG are schedule for annual reviews on May 28th. Full schedule getting into SIGGRAPH, we may need to rearrange the schedule.