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New Fellows 2014

During EUROGRAPHICS 2014 the Fellows of the Association made a proposal to the Executive Committee that new Fellows be elected. The proposal was accepted and the names of the new Fellow were announced at the General Assembly. The new Fellows are Frédo Durand, Eugene Fiume, Heidrun Schumann and Michela Spagnuolo. The contributions which they have made to computer graphics and to EUROGRAPHICS are outlined below together with the reasons for their nomination. Congratulations to all four!

Frédo Durand

Frédo Durand is a professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and a member of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL). He received his PhD from Grenoble University, France, in 1999, supervised by Claude Puech and George Drettakis. Before that he graduated from the prestigious Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris. From 1999 till 2002, he was a post-doctoral researcher in the MIT Computer Graphics Group with Julie Dorsey. His research interests are in computer graphics and computational photography. They span most aspects of picture generation and creation, with emphasis on mathematical analysis, signal processing, and inspiration from perceptual sciences. A sampling of his most recent work includes work on motion magnification, image-manipulation, domain-specific languages, light transport among many others. He has published extensively (40 papers at ACM SIGGRAPH, and many more at EUROGRAPHICS, EGSR, SIGGRAPH Asia, ACM TOG etc.), including several very highly cited papers. Notable examples of these include his work on fast-bilateral filter for HDR imaging, coded aperture cameras and feature-preserving mesh smoothing. Frédo has supervised a large number of Ph.D. students and postdoctoral fellows, who have continued in their research careers, many of them excelling either in academia or in industry. He co-organized the first Symposium on Computational Photography and Video in 2005, the first International Conference on Computational Photography in 2009, and was IPC co-chair of the EUROGRAHICS Symposium on Rendering in 2012. He was on the advisory board of the ACM SIGGRAPH and several other conferences, and has participated numerous times in the ACM SIGGRAPH and EUROGRAPHICS program committees, among others. He received an inaugural EUROGRAPHICS Young Researcher Award in 2004, an NSF CAREER award in 2005, an inaugural Microsoft Research New Faculty Fellowship in 2005, a Sloan fellowship in 2006, and a Spira award for distinguished teaching in 2007. Frédo has contributed numerous groundbreaking scientific results and is one of the leading figures in our field today. He was one of the main contributors to the creation of the field of computational photography, which is now considered one of the four main areas in Computer Graphics.

Frédo Durand was elected to a Fellowship of the Association in recognition of:

  • his exceptional contribution to the fields of computer graphics and computational photography, as witnessed by his numerous and highly cited publications;
  • his contributions to EUROGRAPHICS as an author of numerous papers in the association’s events and as event organizer.

Eugene Fiume

Eugene Fiume is professor of Computer Science at the University of Toronto. He graduated from the University of Toronto with a PhD in computer science in 1986, supervised by Alain Fournier and Eric Hehner. His postdoctoral work was done in 1986-87 at the University of Geneva under Dennis Tsichritzis. At that time he started a long term research relationship with European colleagues, later working as a Visiting Professor at the University of Grenoble, France. He has been a member of various boards, including the Scientific Advisory Board of GMD, (Bonn, Germany) and of the Max Planck Centre for Visual Computing and Communication (Saarbrucken, Germany), as well as many industrial boards. After spending time in industry with Alias/Wavefront, he led the department of computer science in Toronto as chair where he was instrumental in hiring more than thirty faculty, raising the international ranking of the department into the top ten in the world, and helped raise \$3.5M of funds for the department from external donors. Currently he helps lead the Dynamic Graphics Project. He is director of the Masters of Science in Applied Computing programme at the University of Toronto, and is Principal Investigator of a \$6M project on the construction of a digital media and systems lab. He has recently accepted the role of the next Scientific Director of the GRAND NCE in 2015 involving researchers in more than 25 universities and technology companies.

His early research work was on the mathematical foundations of computer graphics, which were particularly recognised in Europe. Following this, Eugene’s main scientific contributions have been to physically and visually realistic computer graphics; he has also made contributions to medical physics, biomechanics, anatomy, computational physics, and radiative transfer. His papers span these fields, with many publications appearing in EUROGRAPHICS (including a best paper award) and ACM SIGGRAPH; he has a long list of successful PhD students and former employees with whom he has had productive collaborations. Alain Fournier was his most frequent collaborator, and together they made many contributions to sampling, filtering and rendering problems.

Eugene’s work has also affected computer graphics in practical ways. The “wire” deformation technique, developed with Karan Singh, is now ubiquitous in commercial geometric modelling and animation. Work with Jos Stam in simulating wind, smoke, clouds and fire broke the ground for future efforts in this area and this work led to successful commercial deployment in hundreds of films requiring the realistic simulation and control of natural phenomena. His work with Alias and subsequently Autodesk stimulated a more than twenty-year relationship involving over 100 Toronto graduates, many of whom are still with Autodesk.

Eugene has a long list of contributions to the scientific community of computer graphics, some mentioned above, and which also includes conference organization, committee memberships, refereeing and editorships.

Eugene Fiume was elected to a Fellowship of the Association in recognition of:

  • his broad and high-quality research in visual computing and his innovation in computer animation, rendering, medical computing, and computational physics;
  • his contributions to EUROGRAPHICS as author and IPC member, and to EG events, such as co-chairing the Symposium on Computer Animation.

Heidrun Schumann

Heidrun Schumann is professor of Computer Graphics at the Institute for Computer Science, University of Rostock, Germany since 1992. Her main research fields are Computer Graphics, Visualization and Human-Computer-Interaction. She leads a research team working on a wide range of topics, including visualization of multivariate data in time and space, information visualization and visual analytics, user support for visualization and visualization design, visual interfaces for mobile devices and multi-display environments, image transmission and image display in mobile contexts and rendering. She has published extensively in these fields in many journals and conferences. She is co-author of one of the few visualization textbooks in German and of a recent textbook on visualizing time-oriented data. She has supervised at least 27 PhD students and about 170 Masters students. She teaches computer graphics and visual computing at Bachelors and Masters levels. She has served on numerous program committees and she is one of the EuroVis 2014 full papers co-chairs. She is an Associate Editor of the Computers & Graphics journal.

Heidrun Schumann was elected to a Fellowship of the Association in recognition of:

  • her research in information visualization and mobile graphics;
  • her service to the European visualization community;
  • her influence and role in computer graphics in the eastern part of Germany;
  • her supervision of numerous successful PhD students;
  • her contributions to visualization text books.

Michela Spagnuolo

Michela Spagnuolo is currently Research Director at the Institute of Applied Mathematics and Information Technologies, in Genova, of the National Research Council of Italy (CNR-IMATI). She received the Doctorate degree in Computer Science Engineering at the INSA Lyon, France, and the Laurea degree (with honors) in Applied Mathematics at the Dept. of Mathematics of the University of Genova, under the supervision of Dr Bianca Falcidieno.

At CNR-IMATI, she is leading the research group on “Advanced techniques for the analysis and synthesis of multidimensional media”. Her research activities started with a focus on geometric reasoning for the analysis and characterization of shapes and on the use of fuzzy arithmetic for the representation of uncertainty in geometric models. She has been actively involved in the development of semantics-driven approaches for representing 3D shapes, based on coupling knowledge technologies with geometric representations In this area, she was heavily involved in the definition and development of the AIM@SHAPE repository which is now among the most cited sources of shape models in Computer Graphics papers. Recently, her research interests have focused mainly on computational topology approaches for shape analysis and for the evaluation of similarity at the structural and semantic level.

On these research topics, she has co-supervised several PhD and Ms thesis, and authored more than 140 reviewed papers in scientific journals and international conferences. She is an associate editor of Computers & Graphics and The Visual Computer and she was associate editor of Computer Graphics Forum. She co-edited the book “Shape Analysis and Structuring”, published by Springer, and was guest-editor of several journal special issues and conference proceedings. Among these, the special issue of Computers & Graphics on executable papers for 3D object retrieval, fostering the adoption of reproducibility as a criteria of evaluation of research in Computer Graphics.

She is a member of the steering committee of the Shape Modelling International conference, and was programme chair of various international conferences and workshops. She has been working as scientific responsible for many international and national projects, where geometry processing was studied in various application domains, from biomedicine and bioinformatics to the processing of large geospatial data.

She has served EUROGRAPHICS in numerous ways including the promotion of the EUROGRAPHICS workshop on 3D Object Retrieval, which has been organized regularly as an EG workshop co-located with the main conference since 2008. She has served as a EUROGRAPHICS Programme Committee member, as tutorial and State-of-the-Art co-chair, and as Workshop chair of the EG Symposium on Geometry Processing in 2013.

Michela Spagnuolo was elected to a Fellowship of the Association in recognition of:

  • her research contributions to the advancement of the theory and practice of shape modelling;
  • her contributions to EUROGRAPHICS including promotion of 3D object retrieval.