Stefan Bruckner received his Ph.D. in 2008 from the Vienna University o f Technology (VUT), Austria, supervised by Meister Eduard Gröller. He is currently an Assistant Professor at the Institute of Computer Graphics and Algorithms at VUT. In 2009/2010, he spent one year as a visiting Postdoctoral Fellow at Simon Fraser University, Canada.
His research interests include biomedical and illustrative visualization, volume rendering, and visual data exploration. He received the EuroVis 2010 Best Paper Award, the EG2007 Third Best Paper Award, and the Karl-Heinz-Höhne Award for Medical Visualization 2006.
He has published many papers with contributions predominantly in visualization and medical applications. His work has appeared in the most important journals and conferences of the field (EuroVis, IEEEVisualization, Eurographics).
His most significant contributions are in the field of illustrative visualization. He has proposed novel volume visualization algorithms inspired by classical illustration allowing interactive and simultaneous inspection of interior and exterior structures while preserving clear shape cues.
Stefan developed the VolumeShop system for the interactive generation of high quality illustration directly from volumetric data fields, which has already had significant impact. This system allows the designer of an illustration to work directly on measured data and uses abstraction to reduce visual clutter while revealing hidden detail. He also introduced the concept of style transfer functions to allow the flexible combination of different rendering styles. In addition, he developed a context preserving volume rendering model as an effective alternative to conventional clipping techniques for explorative volume visualization. Finally, Stefan introduced the notion of isosurface similarity maps (Best Paper Award at EuroVis 2010), which quantify the mutual similarity between all isosurfaces within a volumetric data set. This approach opens several interesting directions for future investigation.
Stefan Bruckner’s contributions represent a clear advance in the state of the art of the visualization field. He has proposed efficient algorithms with a well established theoretical basis, clearly demonstrating the practical application of illustrative visualization.
Eurographics is pleased to recognize Stefan Bruckner with the 2011 Young Researcher Award.