In April 2022 the Fellows of the Association made a proposal to the Executive Committee that two new Fellows be elected. The proposal was accepted and the names of the new Fellows were announced at the General Assembly. The new Fellows are Bedřich Beneš and Christian Theobalt. The contributions which they have made to computer graphics and to EUROGRAPHICS are outlined below together with the reasons for their nomination. Congratulations to both of them!
BEDŘICH BENEŠ
Bedřich Beneš is a Professor of Computer Science at Purdue University (USA) and a High Performance Computer Graphics Laboratory director. He received his Ph.D. from Czech Technical University in Prague in 1998.
Bedřich Beneš works in generative methods for geometry synthesis, and his main focus is in procedural, inverse procedural modeling, simulation of natural phenomena, and additive manufacturing. He has published over 150 research papers in the field, which attracted more than 6,000 citations so far. He has been sponsored by the National Science Foundation, NASA, Adobe Research, Intel, Siemens, Samsung, Department of Energy, and Ford Inc.
Bedřich regularly serves on program committees of the top conferences in the field, including Siggraph, Siggraph Asia, International Conference on Geometric Modeling and Processing, Symposium on Geometry Processing, Workshop on Procedural Content Generation in Games, Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment (XSEDE), Computer Graphics International (CGI), Eurographics, and Eurographics Workshop on Natural Phenomena. In addition, he was papers co-chair of Eurographics 2017.
Bedřich is a senior member of ACM and IEEE. He is a member of seven Journal Editorial Boards including Associate Editor of in Silico Plants (Oxford Academic), Associate Editor of Computer Graphics Forum (Willey), Associate Editor of Computers & Graphics (Elsevier), Associate Editor of Computer Animation and Virtual Worlds (Wiley), and Associate Editor of IEEE Computer Graphics Applications. Bedrich was Editor in Chief of Computer Graphics Forum (Willey) 2018-2021.
Bedřich Beneš has been elected Fellow of the Association in recognition of his outstanding contributions to procedural modeling and simulation of natural phenomena, and his comprehensive service to the community and the Eurographics Association in particular.
CHRISTIAN THEOBALT
Christian Theobalt is a Scientific Director and Head of the “Visual Computing and AI” group at the Max Planck Institute for Informatics (MPII), and a Professor of Computer Science at Saarland University. He has done seminal work at the intersection of computer graphics, computer vision, and deep learning. His groundbreaking work on capturing and rendering detailed visual models of the static and dynamic real world, even in real-time and with a single camera has transformed the field and profoundly advanced the state of the art. Specific research highlights are his work on full body performance capture and free-viewpoint video, on markerless motion capture, on face performance capture, and on neural rendering and animation.
He has published more than 300 peer reviewed papers in top quality journals and conferences. This includes more than 70 papers in the flagship graphics conferences and journals (ACM SIGGRAPH, ACM SIGGRAPH Asia, ACM Trans. Graphics, Eurographics, Computer Graphics Forum), and a similar number in the flagship vision conferences (CVPR, ICCV, ECCV, PAMI, IJCV). The huge impact of his work is reflected by an h-index of 80+ and the fact that his work has already attracted more than 20,000 citations. Few graphics researchers worldwide have such an impact.
Christian Theobalt has received both an ERC Starting Grant (2013) and an ERC Consolidator Grant (2017). He is a recipient of the prestigious German Karl Heinz Beckurts Award (2017), and he received the Eurographics Outstanding Technical Contributions Award (2020). He has been an associate editor of ACM Trans. Graphics, IEEE CG&A, IEEE PAMI, Elsevier Computers & Graphics, and Elsevier Visual Informatics.
Christian Theobalt has prominently served the field of computer graphics in Europe in several ways: He has been active on the ERC Consolidator Grant Panel in Computer Science, chairing the panel in 2021. He has organized several Dagstuhl seminars in his area. He has regularly contributed to the program committees of the top conferences in computer graphics and computer vision, and he has chaired several of these. He is the co-founder of the Captury GmbH, an award-winning start-up, which commercializes today’s state-of-the-art system for high-accuracy marker-less motion capture from multi-view video.
Christian Theobalt has been elected Fellow of the Association in recognition of his seminal contributions to the field of computer graphics and visual computing, as well as his leadership to the community as a workshop and conference organizer and within the ERC.
