Roberto Scopigno is presented with the Eurographics “Outstanding Technical Contributions” Award 2008 in recognition of his outstanding contributions to multiresolution modeling and rendering, 3D scanning, surface reconstruction, scientific visualization, volume rendering and applications to cultural heritage.
Roberto is a research director at CNR-ISTI, an institute of the Italian National Research Council (CNR), where he is part of the Visual Computing Lab. He graduated in computer science from the University of Pisa in 1984, and has been involved in computer graphics research since then. He also held joint appointments at the Department of Computer Engineering and at the Department of Computer Science of the University of Pisa, where he taught computer graphics courses (1990-1996).
The work of Roberto Scopigno has had a profound impact on the field, and several contributions truly stand out. Of particular importance has been his work on surface simplification, LOD and multiresolution representations for surfaces and volumes. He has been one of the driving forces behind the development of Metro, a tool for evaluating different simplification algorithms by measuring the distance between different geometric objects, and his papers on the topic have been cited widely and stimulated considerable follow-up work.
Other significant contributions are his work on speeding up isosurface extraction using interval trees, his algorithm for implicit disambiguation of Marching Cubes, his data structures and algorithms for efficient out-of-core memory management and processing of huge meshes, and his stimulating work on 3D scanning with applications to cultural heritage.
The strength of Roberto’s research is documented further by more than one hundred publications that have appeared in the best journals and conferences worldwide. Roberto has kept a steady presence on the program committees of all leading events in the field (ACM SIGGRAPH, Eurographics, IEEE Visualization etc.), and he has successfully co-chaired several of these (Eurographics, EGSR, SGP, VAST etc.). Numerous course presentations at major international events further attest to his standing and the relevance of his work in the field.
Roberto Scopigno is a true scientific leader. He has created a very successful research group at CNR Pisa, and several of his former students have themselves become productive researchers. He has demonstrated considerable leadership to computer graphics research in Europe.
Roberto has significantly advanced the field through his work and by setting a personal example. Eurographics is extremely pleased to recognize Roberto Scopigno with the 2008 Outstanding Technical Contributions Award.