Mark Jackels, DreamWorks Mark Jackels is Director of Research and Development at DreamWorks Animation. Mark has a B.S. in Computer Science from UC Santa Barbara and has developed software for aerospace and automotive applications as well as for commercial packages. In 2002 Mark followed his passion for animation and joined DreamWorks Animation where he’s worked on variety of tools and platforms used in the making of films like “Shrek”, “Kung Fu Panda”, “Madagascar” and, most recently, “How To Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World”. At DreamWorks, Mark oversees teams developing solutions for distributed computing, big data pipelines, visualizations and analytics and most recently, Mark’s team has been applying Machine Learning techniques to improve quality, optimize workflows and automate anomaly detection and mitigation.