In May 2023 the Fellows of the Association made a proposal to the Executive Committee that three 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 Jarke van Wijk, Yiorgos Chrysantou and Alla Sheffer. The contributions which they have made to computer graphics and to EUROGRAPHICS are outlined below together with the reasons for their nomination. Congratulations to all three of them!
JARKE VAN WIJK
Jack (Jarke J.) van Wijk is full professor in visualization at the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science at Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e) in The Netherlands. He completed his MSc and PhD education at Delft University of Technology in 1982 and 1986, respectively. In 1998, he joined Eindhoven University of Technology, where he became full professor in 2001. Besides his outstanding contributions to the scientific field of visualization, he also collaborated closely with companies – not at the least also as co-founder! More recently, Jarke van Wijk assumed essential roles in data science, for example, as scientific director of the Data Science Center Eindhoven.
Jarke van Wijk has contributed broadly to the scientific field of visualization and computer graphics, including seminal works on, for example, flow visualization, tabular data visualization, temporal data visualization, graph visualization, and visual analytics. He has published more than 150 peer-reviewed scientific papers – many of which in the best-possible journals and conference proceedings of the field – and his work is highly respected by his peers (with an h-index of about 65 and over 16 000 citations to his work, he is clearly one of the highest regarded scientists in the field!). About ten of his papers are by now cited more than 400 times and half of them are first-authored by Jarke van Wijk himself!
The visualization community is deeply indebted to Jarke van Wijk for his numerous services. He is regularly chairing the most important conferences of the field, including IEEE Visualization (2003, 2004), IEEE InfoVis (2006, 2007), IEEE VAST 2009, IEEE PacificVis 2010, EuroVis (2011, 2016, 2017), and IEEE VIS 2023. Jarke van Wijk received highly important recognition, including the IEEE Visualization Technical Achievement Award in 2007, the Eurographics 2013 Outstanding Technical Contributions Award, and the VGTC Visualization Lifetime Achievement Award in 2021. His important scientific work was repeatedly awards with multiple best papers awards at the very best visualization conferences and several test of time awards (20 Years Test of Time award at IEEE InfoVis 2019 and 15 Years Test of Time award at IEEE VIS 2020).
Jarke van Wijk has been repeatedly invited to give important talks and speeches, including multilple Keynotes, Capstones, and other invited talks and many of our top-events in the field. He has shaped the visualization research field for multiple decades, contributing highly innovative ideas, and provoking his peers with thoughtful comments and remarks. His enormous reach covers multiple quite diverse threads of research, which distinguishes him as an impressive generalist, while still regularly contributing outstanding single-author papers that attract hundreds of citations. Clearly, he is one of the very few scientific top-leaders in the field of visualization research.
Jarke van Wijk has been elected Fellow of the Association in recognition of his outstanding contributions to many areas of data visualisation and visual analytics, and his comprehensive service to the community and the Eurographics Association in particular.
YIORGOS CHRYSANTHOU
Yiorgos Chrysanthou is the Research Director of the Centre on Interactive Media, Smart Systems and Emerging Technologies – CYENS Centre of Excellence in Cyprus. He is also a Professor at the Computer Science Department of the University of Cyprus. He received his PhD from Queen Mary College, University of London, in 1996.
Yiorgos Chrysanthou has made important contributions to computer animation, crowd rendering and simulation, virtual and augmented reality and applications to cultural heritage. He has published over 100 papers in these fields, which attracted almost 6,000 citations. Many of them were published at the Eurographics conference and other Eurographics venues. He has been sponsored by the EPSRC, the the Cyprus Research Foundation, and the EU under various framework programmes.
Yiorgos regularly serves on program committees of the top conferences in the field, including Eurographics, EGSR, Pacific Graphics, IEEE VR, etc. He has co-chaired a number of international conferences, including VAST/EGSGH 2004, ACM VRST 2005 and 2006, ECMS 2008, and MIG 2010. He dedicate hmself to organize Eurographics 2024 in Cyprus.
Yiorgos is a member of ACM, and a long-term member of the Eurographics Association (since 1996). He serves or has served as Associate Editor of Computer Graphics Forum, Computers & Graphics, and the Journal of Eastern Mediterranean Archaeology and Heritage Studies.
Yiorgos Chrysanthou has been elected Fellow of the Association in recognition of his outstanding contributions to crowd rendering and simulation, virtual reality, and computer graphics in cultural heritage, and his comprehensive service to the community and the Eurographics Association in particular.
ALLA SHEFFER
Alla Sheffer is a Professor of Computer Science at the University of British Columbia. After a PhD at Technion (Israel), a postdoc at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), and a first assistant professor position at Hebrew University (Jerusalem), she joined the CS department at UBC in 2003.
She has made outstanding contributions to modelling, geometry processing. In particular, her work on mesh parameterization, developable surfaces and sketch-based modeling, have significantly impacted the field. She has received many recent awards for her research: fellow of ACM (2021), fellow of IEEE (2021), fellow of the Royal Society of Canada (2020), member of the SIGGRAPH Academy (2020).
Her research addresses geometric modeling and processing problems, both in traditional computer graphics settings and in multiple other application domains including product design, mechanical and civil engineering, and fashion.She has published numerous papers addressing core geometry processing topics, such as hexahedral meshing and developable surface manipulation. Her mesh parameterization methods, particularly the ABF (angle-based flattening) algorithm, are referenced in most books and surveys on geometry processing and are taught in many advanced modeling courses worldwide.
Her recent research applies insights about human perception and communication of shapes to algorithmic shape processing and has yielded novel modeling methods targeted at a broad user base. The algorithms she developed accelerate and simplify the creation of virtual models across multiple domains, including fashion and product design. Her research in this space has benefited from funding from industry-leading companies, including Adobe, IBM, and Google. Her recent work addresses geometric challenges that arise in advanced digital fabrication settings. She is also exploring the use of virtual and augmented reality interfaces for shape communication.
Alla Sheffer was elected to a Fellowship of the Association in recognition of:
– Her exceptional research on mesh parameterization, developable surfaces and sketch-based modeling, have significantly impacted the field.
– Her contributions to EUROGRAPHICS as author and IPC member, and to Eurographics events, such as co-chairing the Symposium on Geometry Processing as well as the main Eurographics conference. She was also associate editor of the Eurographics journal CGF.