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New Fellows 2016

During EUROGRAPHICS 2016 the Fellows of the Association made a proposal to the Executive Committee that three 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 Paolo Cignoni, Hans-Christian Hege and Renato Pajarola. 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 three!

Paolo Cignoni

Paolo Cignoni is a Senior Researcher in the Visual Computing Group of ISTI-CNR, an Institute of the Italian National Research Council (CNR). He holds a Laurea (1992) a Ph.D. degree (1998) in Computer Science from the University of Pisa, Italy. Since 1997 he had appointments at the Department of Computer Science of the University of Pisa, where he teaches computer graphics courses. His research, widely published in major journals and conferences, spans many areas of computer graphics and scientific visualization, with a special focus on geometry processing, 3D scanning and cultural heritage, and interactive graphics. Paolo has coordinated the development of many successful software tools that have found practical application in both academia and industry, including MeshLab, Metro, and QuteMol. He regularly serves as program committee member and reviewer for international conferences and journals in visual computing and is currently of the Editorial Board of IEEE Transactions on Computer Graphics and Visualization, Computer Graphics Forum, The Visual Computer, and ACM Journal on Computing and Cultural Heritage. He was a papers co-chair of the Eurographics 2012 conference and he currently chairs the Eurographics Annual Award for the Best PhD Thesis. He serves on the Eurographics Executive Committee since 2015.

Paolo Cignoni was elected as a Fellow of the Association in recognition of:
1. outstanding research contributions in visualization and geometry processing, many of those being presented at EG events;
2. leadership of open source projects in CG that help building a community;
3. service to the Eurographics community as executive board member, PhD awards committee member, Eurographics papers chair, IPC member of EG conferences and symposia, editorial member of CGF.


HANS-CHRISTIAN HEGE

Hans-Christian Hege is the Head of the Research Department “Visual Data Analysis” at Zuse Institute Berlin (ZIB). After undergraduate studies in Physics, Math, and Philosophy (1977-1984) he conducted graduate studies in Theoretical Physics at Freie Universität Berlin (1984-1989), working in particular on computer simulation of quantum field theory and lattice gauge theory. Already in 1986 he co-founded the visual effects company Mental Images, where he served as a Senior Scientist until 1989. He joined the ZIB institute in 1989, first working in high performance computing and computational physics, and later focusing on visualization. Hans-Christian Hege shaped the ZIB into an internationally visible powerhouse for visualization. He has also been involved in founding two further startups: Indeed – Visual Concepts GmbH (1999, now part of Visage Imaging), and Lenne3D GmbH (2005).
In the field of scientific visualization, Hans-Christian Hege is very well known for developing one of the most widely used software platforms, the Amira software for visualization and visual data analysis. Amira was also the basis for the widely-used visualization software Avizo. He has impacted a wide range of subfields, such as vector field and flow visualization, for example his work on fast line integral convolution, illuminated stream lines, and vector field topology, and volume rendering, for example of adaptive mesh refinement hierarchies. His 1995 paper on fast line integral convolution was one of the earliest visualization papers published at the annual SIGGRAPH conference. A more recent focus area of his research is in the important field of uncertainty visualization. In addition to fundamental algorithms and techniques, his work has also always emphasized the application of visualization to the sciences, such as the interactive visualization of cosmological simulations in physics, and his work on brain atlases and the segmentation and visualization of neuronal structures in neuroscience.
In the Eurographics community, Hans-Christian Hege has been highly visible as one of the driving forces behind the Associations’ activities in visualization. He has served as co-chair for many EG-sponsored events and prizes, including the EG Medical Prize Competition (2013, 2015), EuroVis (2009), and Volume Graphics (2007, 2008).

Hans-Christian Hege was elected as a Fellow of the Association in recognition of his outstanding contributions to visualization research and technology transfer, as well as his excellent leadership and service to the Association and beyond.

RENATO PAJAROLA

Renato Pajarola is a full Professor in Computer Science in the Department of Informatics at the University of Zürich (UZH). He received his Dipl. Inf.-Ing. and Dr. sc. techn. degrees in computer science from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) Zurich in 1994 and 1998 respectively. Subsequently he was a post-doctoral researcher and lecturer in the Graphics, Visualization & Usability (GVU) Center at Georgia Tech. In 1999 he joined the University of California Irvine (UCI) as an Assistant Professor where he established the Computer Graphics Lab. Since 2005 he has been leading the Visualization and MultiMedia Lab (VMML) at UZH. He is a member of ACM, ACM SIGGRAPH, IEEE CS and Eurographics. His research interests include real-time 3D graphics, geometric modeling, point based graphics, interactive large-scale scientific visualization, remote and parallel rendering, compression and interactive 3D multimedia. He has published a wide range of internationally peer-reviewed research articles in top journals and conferences. Prof. Pajarola regularly serves on program committees, such as for example the IEEE Visualization Conference, Eurographics and EuroVis Conferences, IEEE Pacific Visualization or ACM SIGGRAPH Symposium on Interactive 3D Graphics and Games. He was co-chair and organizer of Eurographics 2015 and EGPGV 2010, and papers co-chair of EG PBG 2007, 2008, EGPGV 2011 and IEEE LDAV 2014. He received Best Paper Awards from Eurographics (2005), IADIS (2007) and SPIE (2013).

Renato Pajarola was elected as a Fellow of the Association in recognition of:
– important research contributions in the area of scalable graphics and  data intensive visualization; 
– continuous service to the Eurographics community as a co-chair of Eurographics and EuroVis conferences, as a steering board member of the Eurographics working group Parallel Graphics and as an IPC member of numerous conferences and workshops.