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New Fellows 2008

New EUROGRAPHICS Fellows

During EUROGRAPHICS 2008 the Fellows of the Association made a proposal to the Executive Committee that new Fellows be elected. The proposal was accepted and the names of the new Fellow were announced at the General Assembly. The new Fellows are Thomas Ertl, Leif Kobbelt, Isabel Navazo and László Szirmay-Kalos. The contributions which they have made to computer graphics and to EUROGRAPHICS are outlined below together with the reasons for their nomination. Congratulations to them all!

Thomas Ertl

Thomas Ertl is a full professor of computer science at the University of Stuttgart, Germany, and the head of the Visualization and Interactive Systems Institute (VIS) and the Visualization Research Center of the University Stuttgart (VISUS). His research interests include visualization, computer graphics and human computer interaction in general with a focus on volume rendering, flow visualization, multiresolution analysis, parallel and hardware accelerated graphics, large datasets and interactive steering.

Thomas Ertl received a masters degree in computer science from the University of Colorado at Boulder and a PhD in theoretical astrophysics from the University of Tübingen. After his PhD, he became a professor of computer graphics and visualization at the University of Erlangen where he lead the scientific visualization group. In 1999 he accepted an offer for a full professorship from the University of Stuttgart. In addition, he is cofounder and a member of the board of science+computing, a Tübingen based IT company.

The work of Thomas Ertl has had a profound impact with contributions on shader debugging (Graphics Hardware 2007), on video visualization (IEEE TVCG 2006), on vortex extraction (IEEE Visualization 2005), on point-based visualization (IEEE Computer Graphics & Applications 2004), on GPU-based cell projection (IEEE TVCG 2003), on transparency in technical illustrations (Eurographics 2002), on pre-integrated volume rendering (Graphics Hardware 2001), and the pioneering work on the use of graphics hardware in volume rendering (SIGGRAPH 1998).

Thomas Ertl is coauthor of more than 300 scientific publications, and his work has shaped the research agenda in volume graphics, visualization and the efficient use of graphics hardware and texturing. He has created one of the world’s top research groups, and he has advised a significant number of PhD students. Ertl also has numerous ties to industry and he actively pursues research on innovative visualization applications in science, medicine, and engineering.

Thomas Ertl has been and is strongly involved in the IEEE Visualization Conferences and in the EG/IEEE Visualization Symposia (EuroVis), and he has been a member of numerous program committees (e.g. SIGGRAPH, Eurographics). Since 2007 he has been Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics and Vice Chairman of the Eurographics Association.

Thomas Ertl’s contributions have been recognized and cited widely, and he has received several awards for his work, including the Eurographics Outstanding Technical Contributions Award and the Technical Achievement Award of the IEEE Visualization and Graphics Technical Committee in 2006. He was elected as a Member of the Heidelberg Academy of Sciences and Humanities in 2007.

Thomas Ertl was elected to a Fellowship of the Association in recognition of:

  • his research contributions to visualization, computer graphics and human computer interaction;
  • his service to the community as Editor-in-Chief of IEEE TVCG, Vice Chairman of Eurographics, and member of the steering committees of the IEEE Visualization conference and the joint EG/IEEE Visualization Symposium;
  • his standing as a world class graphics researcher.

Leif Kobbelt

Leif Kobbelt is a full professor of computer science and chair of the computer graphics group at RWTH Aachen University, Germany. His research interests include geometry processing, 3D geometry acquisition, computer vision, as well as mobile multimedia and interactive visualization.

Leif Kobbelt completed his PhD at the University of Karlsruhe in 1994. After a postdoc stay at the University of Wisconsin in Madison (with Carl de Boor) he joined the Computer Graphics group at the University of Erlangen in 1996 and completed his Habilitation in 1999. Shortly after joining MPI Informatik as an associate professor in 1999, he received an offer for a full professorship from RWTH Aachen University and moved to Aachen in 2001.

Leif Kobbelt’s early work focused on subdivision surfaces where he made several fundamental contributions, including his algorithm for interpolatory subdivision on quad nets with arbitrary topology (Eurographics 1996), his well-known Sqrt(3) subdivision algorithm (SIGGRAPH 2000), and a significant body of pioneering work on variational subdivision and discrete fairing. With the advent of 3D scanner technology, the acquisition and processing of very large unstructured 3D data sets has become an important topic of research with high practical relevance, and Kobbelt’s work has significantly influenced the state of the art: Ideas from subdivision and mesh decimation paved the way for powerful multiresolution techniques and Kobbelt’s SIGGRAPH 1998 paper on interactive multi resolution modeling on arbitrary meshes is one of the most widely cited milestones in this development. Other important contributions are his work on remeshing (e.g. Eurographics 1999, Günther Enderle Award), on feature sensitive surface extraction (SIGGRAPH 2001), and on shape modeling with point sampled geometry (SIGGRAPH 2003).

Leif Kobbelt’s work combines sound mathematical analysis with a thorough understanding of the relevant problems, and significant implementations. His results have helped to shape the newly emerging field of 3D geometry processing. Based on his initiative the Symposium on Geometry Processing Series started in 2003. Within the German Gesellschaft für Informatik he is founding chair of the special interest group on geometry processing.

Leif Kobbelt has chaired several leading international events and served on many international program committees (including Eurographics, SIGGRAPH). His research contributions have been recognized and cited widely, and he received several awards for his work, including the Heinz-Maier-Leibnitz Award from the German Research Foundation (DFG) in 2000 and the first Eurographics Outstanding Technical Contributions Award in 2004.

Leif Kobbelt was elected to a Fellowship of the Association in recognition of:

  • his research contributions to computer graphics and geometry processing;
  • his contributions towards setting up the symposium on geometry processing series and turning it into a leading international event;
  • his chairmanship of several leading international events.

Isabel Navazo

Isabel Navazo is a professor at Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya in Barcelona, Spain.

She has compiled a long service to EG, at both the national and international levels, and has made significant scientific and technical contributions in computer graphics.

Isabel has made many contributions to EG since 1986. She has been one of the main promoters of the Spanish chapter of Eurographics, serving on its executive committee since 1989 and chairing the Spanish chapter from 2007. Isabel also Co-Chaired and co-organised several EG Conferences, including EG93. She has been co-chair of EG events (Short Papers Chair of EG’02, IPC Co-Chair of the EG-IEEE TCVG Symposium on Visualization -VisSym’02- and Co-Chair of SIACG’04. She served on the EG Promotion Board from 2001 to 2004, is an elected member of the EG EXC, and is a member of the EG EXB as chair of the Education Board.

Isabel’s particular EG contributions recently have included an emphasis on computer graphics education. She worked to develop the 2006 computer graphics education workshop and co-chaired the EG07 Education Programme, and she is working to develop the next computer graphics education workshop in 2009. She has been requested to work with the SIGGRAPH Asia education program to present a fully international view of computer graphics education at that conference. Education is an important fields in which EG has long had an important leadership role, and she continues that leadership. Isabel has also continued to build the cooperation between SIGGRAPH and EG on education topics.

Isabel has also had an outstanding role in the computer graphics reserach group of the UPC, Barcelona, and has also been one of the main contributors to the dissemination of Computer Graphics in Spain. She has published a wide range of contributions, mainly in the areas of Geometric Modeling, Visibility Computation, and Medical Imagery. She is specially well-known for her contributions to the applications of octtrees.

Isabel Navazo was elected to a Fellowship of the Association in recognition of:

  • her contributions to computer graphics education;
  • her contributions to the Eurographics Association and its Spanish Chapter;
  • her research contributions to computer graphics and geometric modelling.

László Szirmay-Kalos

László Szirmay-Kalos is a full professor of computer science and head of the Department of Control Engineering and Information Technology at the Budapest University of Technology and Economics, Hungary. His research interests include photorealistic image synthesis, global illumination with Monte Carlo techniques, optical material models and BRDFs, scientific visualization, and implementations on computer graphics hardware.

László Szirmay-Kalos completed his PhD in Computer Science at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in 1992. He got a position at the Budapest University of Technology and Economics, where he started a new computer graphics group. In 2001 he became a full professor at this university.

He participated in large scale software development projects which resulted in global illumination and real-time rendering systems. During the last 5 years he led more than 10 research projects. He has written several books and more than 150 scientific papers on realistic rendering.

László Szirmay-Kalos’s early work focused on global solutions for the radiosity calculation, investigating convergence properties and complexity measures of such algorithms. Making use of stochastic methods, in particular of Monte Carlo like algorithms, he managed to improve the runtime of such algorithms dramatically over the years. Other research fields in the late 1990’s were ray shooting algorithms and stochastic reflectance models. With the development of powerful graphics cards László invented various methods to speed up algorithms not only for global illumination, but also for shading, shadows, displacement mapping, and volume visualization.

One of the best graphics textbooks is “Theory of Three Dimensional Computer Graphics” (by László Szirmay-Kalos), which first appeared in 1995. His new book “GPU-Based Techniques for Global Illumination Effects” (co-authored by László Szécsi and Mateu Sbert) summarizes many of the useful results he obtained in the last years. Unfortunately, some of his other books are available only in Hungarian, which on the other hand helped to boost the Hungarian graphics landscape a lot.

László Szirmay-Kalos’s work is characterized by sound mathematical analysis with a thorough understanding of the relevant problems, and significant implementations. His writing style is excellent and so his books are first class comprehensions of the field. His contributions have been recognized and cited widely, and he received several awards for his work, including a third best paper award at Eurographics 1999.

László Szirmay-Kalos was elected to a Fellowship of the Association in recognition of:

  • his research contributions to computer graphics, especially in the field of Monte Carlo global illumination;
  • his contributions to Eurographics, including his roles as co-chairman of the IPC in the Eurographics ’97 event in Budapest (the first time the conference had been held in Eastern Europe), and the Eurographics 2006 event in Vienna;
  • the establishment of a strong computer graphics group at the Technical University of Budapest.