Thomas Müller receives the EUROGRAPHICS Young Researcher Award 2024. Thomas received his PhD from ETH Zürich. He is now a Principal Research Scientist at Nvidia.
Thomas contributed very impactful research results at the intersection of machine learning and (inverse) light transport simulation. His works also had a great impact in practical applications.
Examples from his earlier work are new techniques to render polydisperse, heterogeneous and dynamic, granular mixtures by introducing a grain scattering distribution function. Further, his new approach on practical path guiding using learned spatio-directional radiance fields received the EGSR Best Paper Award.
He also showed a new way to utilize deep networks for the prediction of the light transport inside of clouds in order to approximate atmospheric ef-fects at low cost.
Later, he presented seminal works on using neural networks for neural im-portance sampling in rendering, as well as on rendering of complex participating media effects.
In recent years, one of his major areas of research became inverse rendering techniques and neural reconstruction methods. Variable Bitrate Neural Fields and, especially, Instant Neural Graphics primitives, had a significant impact and enabled a new level of performance in capturing neural fields. The latter received the SIGGRAPH Best Paper Award, as well as the TIME Best Inventions of 2022 Award. Such techniques made projects like Neu-ralangelo possible, in which a high-fidelity surface reconstruction of the David statue by Michelangelo was presented.
Thomas also contributed to the com-munity in the form of several noteworthy and widely used libraries, such as tiny-cuda-nn or the image comparison tool tev. His works were published in the top tier journals and conferences of computer graphics and computer vision. The various honors and awards he already received further illustrate the strong impact that Thom-as had on the field of Computer Graphics and Computer Vision.
EUROGRAPHICS is extremely pleased to recognize Thomas Müller with the 2024 Young Researcher Award in recognition of his outstand-ing contributions to Computer Graphics in the area of machine learn-ing and (inverse) light transport simulation.