Sydney ACM SIGGRAPH Chapter x Canva - April 2025 event

Join the event and learn about how Canva delivers state of the art visual effects in its photo editor. This event will include two presentations, Q&A panel, and following with networking. This event is catered with food and refreshments thanks to Canva. At this event, there will be an election for the Sydney ACM SIGGRAPH Chapter chair and media/marketing coordinator.

Talks:

- Thinking of colour as a 3D space by Deinyon Davies

- From vague research ideas to creative tools for millions by Oliver Richards and Seraphina Buay

Speakers Biographies:

Deinyon Davies is a Senior Software Engineer at Canva, specializing in realtime graphics, computational color science, and image processing. He was a foundational contributor to Canva’s photo editing capabilities, and now builds innovative photo effects, rethinking established methods to build accessible tools for non-technical users. Deinyon holds a Bachelor of Science in Game Development with Distinction and a University Medal from the University of Technology, Sydney. Previously, he was the lead engineer on an online diagram editor at Avolution and worked briefly as a 3D artist. Deinyon ran an online tutorial video series and has published a mobile shader editor tool.

Oliver Richards is a senior machine learning engineer at Canva, where he develops innovative photo editing effects. Before this, he helped build Canva's photo editor as a backend engineer. With a background in robotics and medical devices, Oliver worked as an investigations engineer at Resmed and competed in the RoboCup competition. He holds degrees in mechatronics engineering and computer science from UNSW. He’s passionate about image processing & understanding, photo editing tools and underwater photography.

Seraphina Buay is a product manager at Canva, driving the strategy and roadmap for developing innovative photo editing tools and effects. Before Canva, she was driving the Asia Pacific regional strategy for Adobe.com, leveraging UX, marketing and growth strategies to connect users to Adobe's powerhouse creative tools like Photoshop, Lightroom and Illustrator. She holds a bachelor's degree in marketing and sociology from the University of Sydney and is passionate about creating seamless user experiences, democratising complex image editing tasks, driving user-centric innovation in partnership with engineering and film photography.