Marie-Paule is a professor at Grenoble Institute of Technology (Grenoble INP). She graduated from the prestigious Ecole Normale Superieure, in France. She received a PhD from the University of Paris (supervised by C. Puech) in 1990. She was appointed as a assistant professor (Maitre de Conferences) in 1991, and became full professor in 1997. In 1999 she received the prestigious Institut Universitaire de France membership; in 2007 she received the national Irène Joliot Curie award for her action for women in Computer Science. She heads the research group EVASION (INRIA/ Laboratoire Jean Kuntzmann, CNRS and Grenoble University).
Marie-Paule has made major contributions to the field of computer graphics. Her main technical contributions can be summarized in three domains: implicit modeling, animation and interactive shape design.
In her early work published at SIGGRAPH 1993, she developed an implicit formulation for precise contact modeling; this paper has deeply influenced the field. Her method improved contact and collision processing for non-rigid objects, and served as inspiration for much further work in de-formable models and collision detection. After several contributions to convolution surfaces, she recently revisited implicit blending, enabling implicit solids to blend locally, only where they intersect (EG 2010).
In animation, together with her Ph.D. student M. Desbrun she introduced smoothed particles for animation (EGCAS 1996), which has resulted in many follow-up results, notably for particle and point-based animation techniques. Her work on real time deformable models, presented at SIGGRAPH 2001, has also been extensively cited. The method used hierarchical tetrahedral meshes and was a pioneering adaptive resolution technique, inspiring many influential papers. She has also developed several solutions for animating natural scenes and more recently characters hair and clothing. This includes the work on super-helices presented at SIGGRAPH 2006 and on animation wrinkling presented at SIGGRAPH ASIA 2010.
Her third area of research is interactive shape design. After many contributions to virtual sculpting systems, virtual clay and constant volume deformations, she recently addressed sketch-based modeling. This includes both the iterative modeling of arbitrary shapes and the inference of specific shapes – such as garments, hair or tree – from a single sketch. These have been published at top-level venues, including the Eurographics conference.
The work described above, together with numerous other projects illustrate the outstanding technical contributions of Marie-Paule Cani to Computer Graphics. She has published over one hundred and forty papers in all the top conferences and journals in the field, including widely cited major pub¬lications. In addition, Marie-Paule is a talented mentor and teacher. Several of her former students have pursued remarkable careers in academia in major North American and European universities and research institutes.
Marie-Paule has also been member of the program committees of all the major conferences in computer graphics (Eurographics, ACM SIGGRAPH etc.), and has chaired or co-chaired many of these (Eurographics, SCA etc.). She is or has been member of the editorial boards of several major journals (IEEE TVCG, Graphical Models, Computer Graphics Forum). She created and was the first president of the French Chapter of EUROGRAPHICS and served on the Eurographics EXC. She is a Eurographics fellow and has been “director at large” of ACM SIGGRAPH EXC since 2008.
Marie-Paule has been instrumental in advancing the field of computer graphics, with her strive for scientific excellence and her exemplary creativity.
Eurographics is extremely pleased to recognize Marie-Paule Cani with the 2011 Outstanding Technical Contributions Award.