User:Grafman
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- Bob "Grafman" Free
Grafman has been developing 2D/3D/imaging software since 1973, and believes in giving back to the Internet community by releasing freeware and contributing to Open Source projects.
History[edit]
Grafman was raised in both art and science, remaining involved in math, dance, music, and graphic arts.
Grafman was first exposed to computers in the early 70's at a nearby junior college, that just happened to one of few centers dedicated to APL programming. APL required special characters that were not available on computer terminals at the time, so you needed a graphics terminal (Tektronix) to program in APL.
Grafman taught himself APL, and the mathematics of 3D transforms, and developed a vector-based 3D modeling/rendering system with scalable fonts and hidden-line removal in 1973.
At Cal Poly SLO, Grafman studied Architectural Design, with a minor in Computer Science, developing a 3D CAD system as his senior project. While at school, he worked part-time as a software contractor for the university, developing 3D solar and cast shadow analysis applications - and tutored math grad students on programming in APL.
During the early 80's Grafman worked for various companies developing 3D CAD/AEC/GIS systems: Syscomp (acquired by Data General) and McDonnell Douglas Communications (for BellCore, Pacific Telesys, SouthWestern Bell, and others).
Grafman started his first company Graphcomp in 1982 on a part-time basis, then went full-time with a couple of employees in 1985. Graphcomp was dedicated to software consulting for the CAD/GIS industry, with customers throughout the US, in Canada and in New Zealand.
In the mid-80s Grafman began working with new perceptual color models that better reflected how we see, and began applying this to skin-tone recognition/filtering, computer vision, and image/video compression.
Tired of working in the mainframe/defense industry, Grafman moved to Silicon Valley in 1990 - where he became involved with the internet, developing client/server, peer-to-peer and online services technologies. As a consequence, Grafman became very familiar with scalable database architectures, as well as crypto/security. Grafman developed the first commercial SSL DLL, and was invited to participate in the SSL 2 and MS Crypto API review committees.
In the mid-90s, Grafman started a subsidiary to Graphcomp, called Grafman Productions, dedicated to visual design and online communications.
Grafman's parents were Jitterbuggers; he has danced his entire life. In the 70s Grafman became a semi-professional Jazz dancer performer in San Luis Jazz. In the late 90s Grafman was introduced to Blues dancing, and eventually launched the first weekly Blues/Fusion dance in the SF Bay Area in March of 2011: South Bay Fusion - which continues to this day.
Grafman continued his work in color models, skin-tone detection, and transitioned into shape, object, face detection/recognition - and began developing a number of technologies revolving around scoring/sorting visual images and video frames. In 2010, Grafman joined Apple as a senior face recognition researcher.
Grafman continued to develop scalable online media services and launched MedChroma in May of 2012 - dedicated to processing DICOM ct-scans and MRIs into segmented, color 3D models. Shortly afterwards, Grafman joined Naked Labs to develop a fast/accurate 3D body scanner. Later Grafman joined SKUR developing 3D computer vision solutions for 3D Lidar scanning of facilities, then as Director of Engineering at Bellus3D creating an accurate 3D head/face scanning system.
During the covid-19 pandemic, Grafman spent his personal time to establish covid standards: when to shut down, when to re-open, and vaccination/masking policies for SF Bay Area dance communities. In early 2021, Grafman created a mobile app to scan SMART/FHIR QR Codes; on July 2021 Grafman released a web-based app and cloud service hosted on Graphcomp's subsidiary VizCat - dedicated to provide a way to digitally verify full-vaccination status, contact tracing, and integration into event check-in procedures. Today VizCat supports SMART/FHIR and EU's GreenPass QR Codes.