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For information about PHD Award please visit Eurographics Annual Award for Best PhD Thesis.

Recipients of the Award (2023)

In his PhD thesis, Gaspard Zoss made significant contributions towards solving the problem of facial performance retargeting. His work draws extensively on empirical data, and provides methods carefully designed to facilitate current professional workflows.

His thesis has been instrumental in advancing the modeling and acquisition of jaw motion, the removal and synthesis of secondary dynamic effects present in facial performance capture, and data-driven re-aging.

His focus on practical solutions, developed with attention to production pipelines, stands to benefit not only the scientific community, but also the entertainment industry.

Eurographics is pleased to present the Eurographics 2023 PhD Award to Gaspard Zoss.

In his PhD thesis, Georg Sperl explored the use of physical laws governing yarns to model the elasticity of knitted cloth. Georg Sperl proposed an original approach based on simulation of fabrics at the scale of periodic yarn patterns, approximating the mechanical response of real samples from the textile industry. Georg Sperl’s thesis represents an important step toward the real-time simulation of the dynamics of thousands of yarn meshes in real time. A key contribution has been to consider each yarn and its physics, instead of meshes that only reproduce the overall properties of the material, while maintaining a reasonable computational cost. The thesis has the potential to benefit the textile industry in designing new fabrics.

Eurographics is pleased to present the Eurographics 2023 PhD Award to Georg Sperl.

In his PhD thesis, Hsueh-Ti Derek Liu pioneered the use of data-driven approaches for geometric stylization and acceleration. Hsueh-Ti Derek Liu introduced a generic data-driven stylization method based on three ways to characterize the style of geometry: style of rendering, difference between a shape and its simplified counterpart, and similarity of surface normals.

Hsueh-Ti Derek Liu’s thesis also represents an important step towards scalable geometry processing. Key contributions have been to study coarsening algorithms that preserve spectral properties and novel multigrid methods that operate on unstructured curved meshes. The thesis summarizes a coherent activity that goes from shape editing to surface multigrid methods through stylization and shape analogies.

Eurographics is pleased to present the Eurographics 2023 PhD Award to Hsueh-Ti Derek Liu.

In her PhD thesis, Yifan Wang explored the use of deep learning techniques to distill user expertise in geometry processing algorithms. Yifan Wang’s contributions are especially important in applications where geometric details must be preserved or reconstructed starting from incomplete and/or distorted input. Dealing with such challenging data often requires human intervention to compensate for missing or imprecise information. Yifan Wang’s thesis demonstrates that deep learning can effectively minimize this need, and sometimes eliminate it at all, thus representing a significant advancement in practical geometry processing.

Eurographics is pleased to present the Eurographics 2023 PhD Award to Yifan Wang.

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Recipients of the Award (2022)

In his PhD thesis, Julien Philip pioneered the use of Multi-view Image Editing and Rendering to allow casually captured scenes to be rendered with content alterations such as object removal, re-lighting, or scene composition. Julien Philip exploited an original approach based on optimization techniques and modern deep-learning to take advantage of all the information present in multi-view content while handling specific constraints such as multi-view coherency.

Julien Philip’s thesis represents an important step toward the combination of the flexibility of traditional computer graphics and the ease of capturing assets with images. A key contribution has been to analyze unstructured sets of pictures of real-world environments and obtain a proxy geometry of the scenes using multi-view stereo. The thesis summarizes a coherent activity that goes from treating isolated issues toward a more general neural rendering approach, with notable results such as a multi-view inpainting method that can handle hundreds of images, a deep learning-based multi-view relighting solution for outdoor scenes, a depth map meshing strategy that improves the quality of existing deep blending image-based rendering methods, and a relightable neural renderer for indoor scenes.

Eurographics is pleased to present the Eurographics 2022 PhD Award to Julien Philip.

(2022) Marc Habermann’s thesis enables capturing the pose and deforming 3D surface of an actor from a single RGB video. A key contribution is to recover the depth and deformations of the actor even for areas that are not visible to the camera. He shows that splitting the task into two sub-tasks – regressing the pose then regressing the non-rigid deformation of the surface in a canonical pose to account for clothing deformations – enables solving the problem in a coarse to fine manner with a deep neural architecture, in real-time.

The results of his thesis have been published in top-rated computer graphics and computer vision conferences and journals.

Eurographics is pleased to present the Eurographics 2022 PhD Award to Marc Habermann.

(2022) In her PhD thesis, Ylva Ferstl pioneered new methods for generating virtual human gestures from speech. She explored approaches for speech-to-motion learning, including the use of transfer learning from speech and motion models, adversarial training, as well as modelling explicit gesture parameters from speech. Based on this research, she developed a system for the expressive parametrization of gesture motion which was evaluated in three perceptual studies. Moreover, as part of her work, she also contributed two datasets of conversational speech and motion that have been made available to the community.

Ylva Ferstl’s thesis represents a forward-looking approach to an important problem and addresses the entire pipeline of gesture generation from speech in a comprehensive manner. Her research has resulted in a number of high-quality papers which have already received considerable attention.

Eurographics is pleased to present the Eurographics 2022 PhD Award to Ylva Ferstl.

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Recipients of the Award 2021

(2021) In his PhD thesis, Julian Iseringhausen explored the problem of revealing information hidden in generalized image data, for settings where the physical scenes of interest are not directly observable due to obstruction or small size. Using physics-informed models, computer graphics techniques and numerical simulation combined with discrete optimization, he pioneered novel calibration schemes for non-line-of-sight imaging setups, acquisition of unstructured light fields via water drops utilized as light field imagers, and physical realization of computational parquetry art. The thesis has made possible to estimate the 3D geometry of a scene “around the corner” through time-resolved transient images, and to extract a full unstructured light field of a scene from a single photo of a glass pane with water drops on it. His research is now stimulating new research work. Eurographics is pleased to present the Eurographics 2021 PhD Award to Julian Iseringhausen.

(2021)In his PhD thesis, Michal Piovarci has made significant contributions to the recent field of perception-aware fabrication, which involves human interaction beyond the visual and connects human perception research and computational design for fabrication. The key motivation of his work is to consider human perception for the computational design and realization of physical objects and products that are intended to be used by humans. Michal Piovarci’s thesis presents pioneering work in haptic perception, in the context of physics simulation and fabrication. It shows that incorporating perceptual models of human haptic feedback yields improvements in both the quality and performance of algorithms for computational fabrication. His work shows that manufacturing itself can be automatically incorporated inside a design loop to build artifacts that are optimally perceived while undergoing complex interactions. A key contribution has been to establish the mapping between desired perceptual properties and physical artifacts through fabrication-in-the-loop optimization methods when pure numerical solutions do not exist. During his PhD thesis, Michal Piovarci contributed a number of algorithmic innovations in the areas of physics simulation, simulation-guided optimization, one-shot learning as well as perceptual model creation. Eurographics is pleased to present the Eurographics 2021 PhD Award to Michal Piovarci.

(2021) In his PhD thesis, Ruslan Guseinov pioneered new methods for the design and fabrication of doubly curved shells, from an initial flat state. He explored both shells that are deformed by applying external loads, and the first self-morphing shells that are programmable in space-time. The latter demonstrate unprecedented control over deformation rates during the morphing processes. The contributed methodologies contribute and bridge several fields such as computer graphics, mechanical engineering and architecture. Ruslan Guseinov’s thesis enables a wide range of practical applications and will inspire future work such as design and realization of freeform cold bent glass facades, fabrication of self-morphing mechanisms via 4D printing, materials reacting to various physical stimuli and self-shaping medical devices or furniture. The results of his thesis have been published both in top-rated graphics conferences as well as in the prestigious Nature Communications venue. Eurographics is pleased to present the Eurographics 2021 PhD Award to Ruslan Guseinov.

(2021) Two honorable mentions: Abhimitra Meka and Thomas Müller

Recipients of the Award 2020

(2020) Christopher Brandt Eurographics is delighted to present a PhD thesis award to Christopher Brandt for his strong technical contributions in developing novel model order reduction tools to devise fast approximation algorithms for a broad variety of problems, such as modeling and simulation of elastic bodies, design of tangential vector fields on curved surfaces, and approximation of curve-like data.

(2020) Thomas Leimkühler Eurographics is delighted to present a PhD thesis award to Thomas Leimkühler for his strong technical contributions in setting new state-of-the art in view synthesis techniques by applying classical and modern tools from artificial intelligence to speed up and extend the scope of image-based rendering.

(2020) Mina Konakovic Lukovic Eurographics is delighted to present a PhD thesis award to Mina Konakovic Lukovic for her strong technical contributions in computational fabrication by developing computational tools based on the insights from differential geometry to create programmable materials and turn flat materials into complex curved structures.

(2020) Aron Monszpart Eurographics is delighted to present a PhD thesis award to Aron Monszpart for his strong technical contributions to 3D scene understanding from RGB[-D] sequences with high levels of occlusion using non-visual queues, derived from Newtonian physics, non-local spatial regularity and consistency with human interactions, for generating realistic 3D reconstructions of static and dynamic environments.

(2020) Ana Serrano Eurographics is delighted to present a PhD thesis award to Ana Serrano for her strong technical contributions spanning multiple areas of visual computing, namely computational imaging, material appearance perception and editing, and virtual reality, integrating human perception in the design of new algorithms.

Recipients of the Award 2019

(2019) Dan Koschier for his strong technical contributions to fast and robust numerical simulation techniques for visual effects particularly in the context of novel FEM-based methods for simulating cutting and fracturing of solids and the simulation of incompressible fluids using SPH discretizations.

(2019) Pascal Bérard for his strong technical contributions in geometric modeling focusing on reconstruction, modeling, and rigging of human eyes for computer animation and tracking applications and setting the tone for high-quality eye modeling for digital human avatars of the future.

(2019) Eduard Zell for his strong technical contributions to designing perceptual studies to understand the critical factors behind appealing human characters under stylization effects as well as developing algorithms for transferring static properties and animation between realistic and stylized faces.

(2019) Honorable mentions: Anastasia Tkach and Julio Marco

Recipients of the Award 2018

(2018) Miika Aittala for his strong technical contributions in computational photography and enabling appearance capture of surface material appearance for real world complex materials using simple hardware and limited measurements with a particular focus on spatially varying reflectance properties.

(2018) Jérémie Dumas for his strong technical contributions in computational fabrication and modeling of complex shapes, and by-example shape synthesis, while taking into account physical behaviour of fabricated structures including mechanical, and elastic properties.

(2018) Pablo Garrido for his strong technical contributions to face capture, animation, and editing from video by combining expressive parametric 3D models with inverse rendering to recover highly-detailed faces and demonstrating impressive applications including virtual dubbing and face reenactment.

(2018) Petr Kellnhofer for his strong technical contribution in perceptual modeling for stereoscopic 3D by running dedicated perceptual studies, deriving new perceptual models from his findings, and integrating these models in computer graphics algorithms.

Recipients of the Award 2017

(2017) Morten Bojsen-Hansen for his strong technical contributions to water simulation techniques for visual effects particularly in topology adaptation, tracking of free fluid surfaces, and handling spatially and time-varying boundary flows.

(2017) Tobias Guenther for his strong technical contributions in optimization-based opacity control of lines and surfaces for occlusion reduction and utilizing techniques from light transport for visualization of unsteady flow.

(2017) Adrian Jarabo for his strong technical contributions to computational imaging by studying the plenoptic function for multidimensional light transport particularly for editing light fields, capturing complex appearances using BTF, and investigating transient light transport.

Recipients of the Award 2016

(2016) Fabrice Rousselle for his strong technical contribution to the reduction of noise artifacts in rendering by the development of an image space adaptive framework for Monte Carlo rendering.

(2016) Marcel Campen for his strong technical contribution to geometry processing field, proposing innovative efficient strategies and algorithms for the generation of high quality quadrilateral layouts.

(2016) Kai Lawonn for his strong technical contribution to illustrative scientific visualization, presenting novel line drawing techniques for depicting medical surfaces and structures in a appealing and informative way.

(2016) Iliyan Georgiev for his strong technical contribution to light transport simulation in proposing efficient path sampling techniques for scenes containing surfaces and participating media.

Recipients of the Award 2015

(2015) Duygu Ceylan In her PhD thesis, Duygu Ceylan pioneered new algorithms for image-based 3D reconstruction and modeling based on symmetry priors. With a focus on urban scenes, Duygu’s work combines high-level data analysis with low-level geometry extraction to significantly improve the accuracy and robustness of multi-view stereo methods.In particular, she solves the fundamental problem of correspondence ambiguity in scenes with high levels of structural repetitions, common in urban facades. Her solution is based on global optimization methods that simultaneously solve for symmetry information and the corresponding 3D reconstruction. This approach not only leads to substantial improvements in reconstruction quality, but also enables a number of high-level editing operations for urban scenes, based on the extracted symmetries. She also explored new methods to design mechanical automata from motion capture data. Duygu Ceylan’s thesis combines novel theoretical insights with efficient algorithms to solve important practical problems. The results of her thesis have been published in top-rated conferences and journals including Eurographics and ACM TOG. -------------------------- Eurographics is pleased to present the Eurographics 2015 PhD Award to Duygu Ceylan for her strong technical contribution to high-level shape analysis, proposing new algorithms for the automatic interpretation of architectural structures.

(2015) Belen Masia In her PhD Thesis, Belen Masia has made significant contributions to the different stages of the imaging pipeline: capture, processing, editing, and visualization. The common denominator in her work has consisted on the combination of novel hardware systems, computational algorithms, and insights from the human visual system. Her works include a new design for coded apertures to recover blurred images, reverse tone mapping operators for high dynamic displays, disparity retargeting algorithms for automultiscopic displays, a metric of visual discomfort for dynamic stereo content, or the first in-depth study about editing workflows for four-dimensional light fields. She was also a co-author of the seminal femtophotography paper that allowed in 2013 to capture light in motion, at a trillion frames per second. Belen's thesis includes impressive advances at the theoretical and practical levels. She has already spent several months collaborating with researchers at prestigious research centers such as the Media Lab in the US, Microsoft Portugal or Tsinghua University in Beijing. Her work is internationally valued and recognized, as her exceptional publication record shows. Moreover, Belen received in 2012 the Nvidia Graduate Fellowship Award, and was chosen in 2014 by MIT Technology Review as one of the top ten innovators under 35 in Spain.