Former Robotics Institute faculty member Doug L. James and Stanford University’s Pat Hanrahan, computer scientists whose innovations in computer graphics have enhanced such movies as “Avatar,” “Hugo,” “The Dark Knight,” “Finding Nemo” and “Star Trek,” are each recipients this year of Katayanagi Prizes in Computer Science.

The individual prizes honor the best and the brightest in the field of computer science and are presented by Carnegie Mellon University in cooperation with the Tokyo University of Technology (TUT). The prizes are endowed by Japanese entrepreneur and education advocate Koh Katayanagi, who founded TUT and several technical institutions in Japan.