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New Fellows 2019

During EUROGRAPHICS 2019 the Fellows of the Association made a proposal to the Executive Committee that two new Fellows be elected. The proposal was accepted and the names of the new Fellows were announced at the General Assembly. The new Fellows are Anna Vilanova and Elmar Eisemann. The contributions which they have made to computer graphics and to EUROGRAPHICS are outlined below together with the reasons for their nomination. Congratulations to both!

 

ANNA VILANOVA

Dr. Anna Vilanova is professor at Delft University of Technology where she leads a research group in visual analytics and medical visualization within the section of computer graphics and visualization.

Dr. Vilanova has pioneered research developments in medical visualization. During her PhD on colon unfolding, she presented an original idea on how to analyze virtual endoscopic images by virtually unfolding the colon and facilitating the analysis and detection of polyps by the doctor. Furthermore, her group were one of the first to work in diffusion weighted/tensor magnetic imaging, which allows the invivo analysis of brain white mater, and later also in 4D Flow phase contrast MRI for hemodynamics visual analysis. Her group provided one of the first systems that allowed the experts the visual analysis of this complex medical data. For this purpose, her team developed novel techniques to include uncertainties in the visualizations, novel visualization strategies, novel illustrative techniques, or geodesic-based fibertracking in DW-MRI.

Dr. Vilanova has generated novel visual analysis (VA) methodology to facilitate the understanding and hypothesis generation by visual exploration, aiding the scientific shift that the big data era is generating. She got remarkable successes in the development of novel dimensionality reduction techniques that address the computational bottleneck and scalability issues, which are essential to interactive visual analysis. This research has led to relevant publications in the visual analytics literature, and new discoveries in the application domain that analyses mass cytometry data. Her visual analysis tools are being used by researchers world wide. Worth mentioning are papers in Nature Communications and the Journal of Experimental Medicine that describe new findings in mass cytometry, which were only possible due to her team’s VA technology.

She has published around 170 peer reviewed publications and has graduated 11 PhDs. The research developed in collaboration with a PhD student won the EuroVis PhD award and the Eurographics Dirk Bartz Medical Prize. In 2005, she was awarded an NWO-Veni, a Dutch personal grant, and in 2013 she got a Dutch NWO-Aspasia grant.

She is a highly recognized scientist in her field of research. She is member of the steering committee of the EG/VGTC Conference on Visualization (EuroVis) since 2014, and elected member of the EUROGRAPHICS executive committee since 2015. She became Vice-Vice president of Eurographics in November 2018.

Anna Vilanova is elected a Fellow of the Eurographics Association in recognition of
1. Her substantial scientific achievements in medical visualization and imaging, and visual analysis in the healthcare domain.
2. Her substantial commitment and lasting contributions to the Eurographics Community including serving in the EG executive committee and EuroVis steering committee, and acting as co-chair of the EuroVis symposium.

 

ELMAR EISEMANN

Elmar Eisemann is a professor at TU Delft, The Netherlands, where he heads the Computer Graphics and Visualization Group. Before he was an associated professor at Telecom ParisTech (until 2012) and a senior scientist heading a research group in the Cluster of Excellence (Saarland University / MPI Informatik) (until 2009). He studied at the Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris (2001-2005) and received his PhD from the University of Grenoble at INRIA Rhone-Alpes (2005-2008). He spent several research visits abroad; at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (2003), Université of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (2006), Adobe Systems Inc. (2007,2008). This very international career enabled him to strongly contribute to CG research and networking within and outside Europe.

His research interests include real-time and perceptual rendering, visualization, alternative representations, shadow algorithms, global illumination, and GPU acceleration techniques. He coauthored the book “Real-time shadows” (CRC Press, 2011) together with Michael Schwarz and Ulf Assarsson.  His research contributions, which include highly cited solutions to photography relighting and the introduction of “Gigavoxels” for efficient voxel rendering, already lead to an h-index of 31 in April 2019, when this nomination is being  written. Elmar received  the Eurographics Young Researcher Award in 2011 and the Netherlands Prize for ICT Research in 2019 for his research work.

In addition to research, Elmar soon showed a very strong commitment in service to the Eurographics association : he was local organizer of the Eurographics Symposium on Rendering (EGSR) in 2010 and 2012 and of High -Performance Graphics (HPG) in 2012, as well as paper chair of HPG 2015 and EGSR 2016. Lastly, he served as General Chair of Eurographics 2018 in Delft (the Netherlands), and all participants were really impressed by his strong involvement in every detail of the conference and by the quality of the organization.

Elmar Eisemann was elected as a fellow of the Eurographics Association in recognition of
1. His outstanding research contributions in computer graphics, especially in the area of rendering, visualization, and GPU accelerates techniques.
2. His long lasting, deep commitment to the Eurographics Community, including leading roles in the organization of a number of specialized Symposia as well as the main Eurographics conference.