Trinidadian wins Oscar

Dr Anil Kokaram poses with his mother Lynette Kokaram after receiving his Oscar at the Scientific and Engineering Academy awards ceremony held at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel in Beverly Hills, California, on Saturday (Photo: Trinidad Guardian Newspaper)

Reprinted from the Trinidad Guardian Newspaper

By Dominic Kalipersad

PORT-OF-SPAIN, Trinidad, February 14, 2007 - A TRINIDADIAN expert on the restoration of films has won an Oscar award for his involvement in the development of visual effects software for films.

He is Dr Anil Kokaram, 39, a Sangre Grande-born engineering lecturer at the Department of Electronic and Electrical Engineering at Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland.

Kokaram received the Scientific and Engineering Academy award at a ceremony held in Beverly Hills, California, USA, on Saturday, a fortnight ahead of the headline acting awards event.

Speaking in a telephone interview from LAX airport in Los Angeles yesterday, Kokaram said: “I feel very privileged to get this award because not many people get the chance…I knew of the nomination since November, but I really didn’t expect this.”

His mother, Lynette, who attended the event with her other son Vasheist, a Port-of-Spain attorney, said she was proud not only of Kokaram but also for her country.

Speaking from Florida about the event, she said, “It was fantastic. Something I never expected to be a part of. I felt extremely proud of my son and for Trinidad and Tobago because I think it was the first for T&T. Little T&T did it!”

Kokaram received the award with three members of UK software developer The Foundry’s development team—Dr Bill Collis, Simon Robinson and Ben Kent —for their work on the design and development of Furnace, an integrated suite of software visual effects.

The Academy (of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences) employed a stringent examination process in selecting the winners, almost like a police investigation,” Kokaram said.

It involved six months of deliberation and assessment by two panels made up of both academics and industrial people in the film industry.”

As for the future, the imaging scientist said he hoped “to run a course in media processing” at the University of the West Indies or the University of Trinidad and Tobago because he believed “people would be interested in another activity besides the petroleum industry.”

He said he was already “building a connection with UWI by having a couple of guys doing research in Dublin in motion analysis of sports events, particularly cricket.”

—The Academy Awards for outstanding film achievements of 2006 will be presented February 25 at the Kodak Theater in Hollywood.

Dr Anil Kokaram is a graduate of Hillview College in Tunapuna. He left T&T in 1986 to study at Cambridge University, England, where he also did his PhD.

He has been a lecturer at Trinity College, Dublin, since 1998. Previously, he was a research fellow at the Signal Processing Lab at Cambridge University’s Department of Engineering.

Kokaram is married to Stafanie, a German technical consultant. His parents are Richard Kokaram, 66, former principal of Hillview College, and Lynette Kokaram, 62, vice principal at Specialist Learning Centre, St Augustine.

Kokaram has particular expertise in motion estimation, which is required for many movie special effects.

He has published a large number of articles on the subject and has also written a book entitled Motion Picture Restoration: Digital Algorithms for Artefact Suppression in Degraded Motion Picture Film and Video.