George Drettakis receives the EUROGRAPHICS Distinguished Career Award 2024. George is an INRIA Senior Researcher. He graduated from the University of Crete, and holds an M.Sc. and Ph.D. from the University of Toronto. He was a researcher in the iMAGIS group at INRIA Grenoble, and founded the REVES research group at INRIA Sophia-Antipolis. Since 2016 he has directed the follow-up group GRAPHDECO. George is a EUROGRAPHICS Fellow and received the EUROGRAPHICS Outstanding Technical Contributions Award in 2007.
Throughout his career he made significant contributions to all aspects of rendering, including image-based approaches, perception, cross-modality, weathering, relighting, or interactive techniques with a recent focus on deep learning methods. From earlier work on perspective shadow maps to more recent advances in neural rendering, George is consistently pushing the envelope in novel and creative ways.
A hallmark of his research are the practical applications enabled by his proposed solutions, built on a solid theoretical background but always including a profound understanding of the actual stumbling blocks and problems that CG practitioners face.
He was awarded an ERC Advanced Grant to research the benefits of accurate, approximate and image-based rendering techniques in a unified framework. His more recent works continue to receive significant attention, including the recent 3D Gaussian Splatting method for real-time radiance field rendering that has significantly impacted both research and industry.
In addition to being a distinguished researcher, George has served in multiple roles in the community. For example: he chairs the ACM SIGGRAPH Papers Advisory Group and the EUROGRAPHICS Steering Committee for the Working Group on Rendering; he was the SIGGRAPH Asia 2010 technical papers chair, and co-chaired both the EUROGRAPHICS Conference and the EUROGRAPHICS Workshop on Rendering. He has been co-editor in chief of top computer graphics journals. George has mentored many young researchers, graduating more than twenty Ph.D. students who built successful careers both in industry and academia.
EUROGRPAHICS is extremely pleased to honor George Drettakis with the 2024 Distinguished Career Award in recognition of his leadership and seminal contributions to one of the core areas in computer graphics.