In 1997, Mike Potel
and Cathy
Frantz co-founded Wildcrest
Associates, a Silicon Valley consultancy and software products
company specializing
in software technology and business consulting, intellectual property
development, and Internet components and applications.
Mike has been a member of the
Editorial Board of IEEE Computer
Graphics & Applications since 1989 and Associate
Editor-in-Chief beginning in 2002. Since 1994
Mike has been Department Editor of the bimonthly column "Applications".
In honor of the Applications Department reaching its tenth anniversary
in 2004, IEEE republished the entire
first decade of Applications articles and made them available for
download, many for free and the rest by subscription to the IEEE
CG&A's Digital Library service. Here is another list of all the articles Mike
has edited since the beginning, which includes the newer articles
appearing since 2004. Mike writes the occasional
feature himself, such as the November 1996 article highlighting Cathy's
work on computer graphics
& DNA
sequencing, a January 1998 article about motion
sickness in computer graphics systems, a January 2000 invited article on the future of computer
graphics
applications as part of the special IEEE CG&A "Vision
2000" issue, and the November 2004 tenth anniversary retrospective
article "A
Decade of Applications".
Mike was the Vice President of Technology and
Chief Technology Officer at Taligent, Inc. Taligent was founded
in March 1992 as a joint venture between Apple and IBM and joined by
Hewlett-Packard in January 1994. Its goal was to develop a fully
object-oriented operating system and portable application environment,
which shipped in July 1995 as the CommonPoint Application System (see
this brief history of
Taligent).
In January 1996, IBM took over sole ownership of Taligent and
in January 1998 formally merged
Taligent into IBM. During this phase, Taligent changed its
focus to the Java platform
with products such as the VisualAge
WebRunner Toolkit (see Mike's technical paper describing its
Model View Presenter (MVP) programming model). Taligent's international
class libraries were licensed by Sun and have been part of Java
since JDK 1.1 and subsequently licensed by others such as Netscape and
Oracle. Sun also licensed Taligent's 2D graphics
class libraries which were added to Java in JDK 1.2 and Taligent's JavaBeans
Migration Assistant for ActiveX development tool.
The complete
Taligent developer documentation, including manuals, class and
member descriptions, and documented sample programs are available
on-line at CERN (also mirrored
here).
The complete set of Taligent US patents (161 as of March 2005) are available on-line at the US Patent and Trademark Office (+ 208 EPO and PCT patents available on-line at Delphion).
In 1995, Mike co-authored the book Inside Taligent Technology, which provides
a comprehensive description of the object-oriented technology
underlying the CommonPoint application system built by Taligent. Over
160 US patents were awarded to members of the Taligent team for this
work.
The front sections and first two chapters were made available for web publication with the kind permission of Addison-Wesley.
Click here to view Barnes & Noble's description and ordering information. Click here to view Amazon.com's description and ordering information.
Mike
was at Apple Computer
from 1985 to 1992. Until 1987 was Engineering Manager in Apple's
Advanced Technology Group and worked for Larry Tesler.
His group was responsible for key Macintosh graphics and sound
technologies including Color QuickDraw, the first Macintosh Color
Display Card, the Macintosh Sound Manager, and the Apple Sound Chip, as
well as development tools such as MacApp and HyperCard. He then
became Senior Director of Software Engineering in Product Development
where he was responsible for all Macintosh System Software and
Development Tools. He initiated both Macintosh System 7.0 and the
"Pink" project that gave rise to Taligent and shipped such Apple
products as QuickTime, TrueType, HyperCard, A/UX, AppleScript, MacApp,
and the Macintosh Programmer's Workshop (MPW).
At Apple, Mike
wrote a 3D rendering toolkit and rendered a set of ray traced images on
Apple's Cray computer which were featured on the cover of the original
Mac II (first color Macintosh) manual and many advertisements from
Apple and Mac 3rd parties. 
While
at Apple, Mike developed the inverse color look-up table technique and
the method for computing it efficiently for color dithering that were
key parts of the 2 US Patents awarded to the team that developed Color
QuickDraw for the Macintosh, used in all Macintosh computers since
1987. The US Patent and Trademark Office on-line patent database
summaries are: 5,068,644 Color graphics system
5,003,299 Method for building a color look-up table
Mike attended graduate school at
the University of Chicago where
he got his M.S. and Ph.D. in the Committee on Information Sciences
(later renamed the Department of Computer Science). He
subsequently joined the faculty in the Department of Biophysics and
Theoretical Biology where he founded the University of Chicago Computer
Graphics and Image Processing Laboratory and rose to the rank of
Research Associate, Associate Professor.
Working with colleague Bob Josephs at the University of
Chicago, Mike, his two graduate students Bridget Carragher and
Dave Bluemke,
and Cathy
Frantz who was at that time a post-doctoral fellow in the lab,
built 3D models of sickle cell hemoglobin
molecules such as the one shown here. They then developed
image processing and 3D reconstruction systems and used them to solve
the molecular structure of sickle cell
hemoglobin fibers that underlie sickle cell anemia, what had been a
10+ year open problem and matter of controversy in the field.
Mike used the image processing system he developed at the
University of Chicago to create the images of propagating cAMP waves in
aggregating cellular
slime molds that appeared on the cover of Science
as well as being featured in the ACM SIGGRAPH 1982 slide set.
Mike's 1977 Ph.D. thesis was about the design of an
interactive real-time animation system for the analysis of motion
recorded on film, called Galatea, co-developed with Bob Futrelle now
Associate Professor of Computer and Information Science at Northeastern
University. It used a large screen projection graphics overlay
system synchronized with 16 and 35mm stop-motion movie
projectors. It could work with multiple simultaneous views and
reconstruct 3D moving coordinates, such as in the heart
motion study shown here. Papers on Galatea were presented 4
different years at the ACM SIGGRAPH Conference and in numerous other
conference proceedings and journals. Mike's thesis advisor was Robert
L. Ashenhurst, who was Chairman of the Committee on Information
Sciences and Editor-in-Chief of the Communications of the ACM.
. 
Mike attended the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor
where he received his B.S. in Mathematics in 1970 and got into
computing and his first programming positions.