ACM SIGGRAPH is proud to honor Dr. Turner Whitted with this year's Steven A. Coons Award.
Turner Whitted was the first to apply the concept of ray tracing to global illumination in computer graphics. The early algorithms cast rays from the eye into the scene until they hit an object, but the rays then stopped. Turner continued the process by inventing recursive ray tracing, in which, when a ray hits a surface, it can generate up to three new types of rays: reflection, refraction, and shadow. This apparently crazy idea --- light, after all, travels in the other direction --- managed to produce a huge leap in the degree of realism of computer-generated imagery, while still avoiding the impossibly complex task of simulating the transport of all photons. The tree of rays that results from the recursive ray tracing approach can be used to generate effective antialiasing.
The power of the ray tracing approach was charmingly demonstrated in "The Compleat Angler" (1979), a groundbreaking early ray-traced computer animation that Turner created while he was at Bell Labs.
The simple and elegant ray tracing algorithm formed the basic grounding for the majority of frames rendered in software by anyone, anywhere over a period of more than thirty years in computer graphics.
Turner went on from this remarkable insight to publish visionary and groundbreaking papers in a wide variety of fields with a remarkable set of collaborators. These papers cover topics as diverse as shaders, procedural graphics, graphics hardware, novel sensors, sensor arrays, and many other topics.
Like many of the pioneers of computer graphics, Turner joined the field with an eclectic background that was far from computer science and certainly wasn't computer graphics. Instead his education was in antennas, stability of non-linear systems, and ocean acoustics. These served to make him a great engineer and scientist as well as allowing him to bring his signal processing skills to bear on the problems presented by the new field of computer graphics. Few people, in the early days of graphics, were as closely attuned as Turner to the importance of antialiasing and to practical methods to address it.
Turner joined Bell Labs from NC State after receiving his Ph.D. in 1978. In 1983, he left Bell Labs to establish Numerical Design Ltd. in Chapel Hill, a company that he founded with Robert Whitton to develop toolkits for 3D computer graphics. Turner also held a faculty appointment at UNC Chapel Hill and in 1997 joined the research division at Microsoft. He is an ACM Fellow, a member of the NAE, and received the 1986 SIGGRAPH Computer Graphics Achievement award.
Long active in service to the community (he's been a member of countless SIGGRAPH technical papers committees), Turner has served on the ACM SIGGRAPH Executive Committee and as ACM SIGGRAPH Papers Chair in 1997. But more important than these official roles, he has long worked quietly behind the scenes for the betterment of the field of computer graphics, doing much to make it into the magical community that it is today.
Although he did not attend the first SIGGRAPH in 1974, he did attend in 1977 and had a paper in 1978. Once he discovered our young community, he also found his intellectual and collegial home. We are delighted to have him as part of our community and to present him with this year's Steven A. Coons award.
Previous Award Recipients
Mary served on the ACM SIGGRAPH Executive Committee from 1990-1999, as President, 1993-1995. She led the Executive Committee, through very difficult financial times, stabilizing the organization under sometimes challenging conditions. Mary chaired a long-term planning activity, "SIGGRAPH in the 21st Century," that helped shape SIGGRAPH's growing range of activities for a decade. She was a relentless supporter of SIGGRAPH-sponsored Small Conferences and helped initiate the co-location of small conferences with the annual conference.
Mary also served as general chair of the 2001 Symposium on Interactive 3D Graphics, and led the Research Triangle Park SIGGRAPH Chapter from 1984-1987. She was an ambassador for SIGGRAPH while serving on the ACM SIG Governing Board (1993-1997) and on ACM Council (1998-2000).
We also recognize Mary's broader activities in our technical community: She was a graphics hardware entrepreneur, exhibiting the then-world's-most-advanced and flexible graphics engine, the Ikonas, at SIGGRAPH in 1980. She has excelled as a pioneer researcher in virtual environments. In the SIGGRAPH annual conferences she has co-authored technical papers, been a panelist and course instructor, and exhibited in Emerging Technologies.
With this award, ACM SIGGRAPH shows its pride in Mary C. Whitton and recognizes her exemplary and broad contributions to the SIGGRAPH organization, its conferences, and its tradition of scholarship.
Biographical Sketch
Mary was a founder of Ikonas Graphics Systems (1978-acquired by Adage 1982) and Trancept Systems (1987-acquired by Sun Microsystems1988). Both companies made user-programmable hardware that was widely adopted in research laboratories for graphics, high quality rendering, image processing, and volume visualization. Mary joined the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1994 and is now Research Associate Professor of Computer Science and Senior Project Manager at UNC's Renaissance Computing Institute. Her research interest is discovering what technologies and techniques make virtual reality experiences effective and using knowledge of human perception to make them more effective. Mary earned a B.A. from Duke University (1970), and an M.S. in Guidance and Personnel Services (1974) and an M.S. in Electrical and Computer Engineering (1984) from North Carolina State University.
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ACM SIGGRAPH is proud to recognize Niloy Mitra with the 2013 Significant New Researcher Award for his innovative and influential contributions to geometric analysis of shapes, 3D modeling techniques and computational design tools.
The hallmark of Niloy's research has been the development of mathematical and computational foundations to discover and use structure and function of 3D objects.
He has successfully applied this philosophy to develop computational frameworks for smart and intuitive acquisition, manipulation, and synthesis of fabrication- and function-aware 3D geometry.
Niloy has made key contributions in the area of acquisition and modeling of geometry. His early research included important contributions in estimating surface normals in noisy point cloud data, local and global registration of 3D shapes, and scan completion using geometric priors. He developed algorithms for detecting symmetry and regularity in unorganized 3D geometry and later proposed 3D modeling tools such as the iWires and the Smart Variations systems for manipulation and synthesis of man-made 3D models.
He has also introduced algorithms for exploring the design space of 3D shapes that can be fabricated using current methods, such as a tool for modeling 3D shapes that cast intriguing shadows, a method for automatically paneling freeform surfaces, and more recently, provided a computational solution for design exploration of useable furniture. The impact of this work goes well beyond the computer graphics community as he and his colleagues interact with practicing designers, architects and engineers.
Niloy consistently demonstrates creative and new approaches to identifying and addressing geometric problems with important design and fabrication applications. We are delighted to recognize his vision and accomplishments with the 2013 Significant New Researcher Award.
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ACM SIGGRAPH recognizes Holly Rushmeier for her work on global illumination, material capture, and the display of high dynamic range images. Her work has enriched our quantitative understanding of every aspect of rendering, from the microscopic characteristics of scattering to the broader representation of appearance to the perception of images by the human visual system.
Holly was a member of the Cornell Program on Computer Graphics where she worked with Kenneth Torrance and Donald Greenberg. A mechanical engineer by training, she was intrigued by the potential of applying techniques from heat and radiative transfer to the emerging field of computer graphics. Some of her most influential work was the development of methods for solving for illumination in the presence of participating media and the extension of the radiosity method to handle specular BRDFs. Also notable was the paper with Gary Meyer, Michael Cohen, Ken Torrance and Don Greenberg on the evaluation of computer graphics imagery, where image results were evaluated both with physical measurements and with psychophysical experiments.
Along with Jack Tumblin, Holly wrote "Tone Reproduction for Realistic Images," the original paper on how to display high dynamic range images on low dynamic range display devices. They introduced tone reproduction to the field, and showed how it was possible to model the human perceptual system's ability to adapt to light levels, so that dim images look dark, and fully lit images look bright. Until this paper, this important aspect of image display had not been properly treated in the literature. The problem became even more important with the advent of digital cameras that capture high dynamic range images. Tone reproduction control is now a part of every image processing toolkit.
Holly has also done important work on appearance capture, for both geometry and materials. She has developed methods for capturing high-resolution textures from multiple scans, capturing bump maps and other material attributes, and has applied these techniques to the digital preservation of cultural artifacts.
Finally, Holly has been an important member of the community and the SIGGRAPH organization, serving on countless technical and administrative committees. We thank Holly for all her service, and honor her with the Computer Graphics Achievement Award for her important research.
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The 2013 ACM SIGGRAPH Lifetime Achievement Award in Digital Art is awarded to Manfred Mohr for his pioneering achievements in creating art through algorithmic geometry. Beginning his creative career in the late 1950's as a jazz musician and painter, he focused on gestural abstraction. In 1962, Manfred began the exclusive use of black and white as means of visual and aesthetic expression. After discovering Professor Max Bense's information aesthetics in the early 1960's, his artistic thinking was radically changed. Within a few years, his art transformed from abstract expressionism to computer generated algorithmic geometry. Encouraged by the computer music composer Pierre Barbaud, Manfred Mohr programmed his first computer drawings in 1969. The combination of mathematics and music gives his work a core essence of rhythm and repetition. In 1972, Manfred began producing sequential drawings and started working on the fixed structure of a cube and made his first computer generated films. He renewed his work on the 4-D hypercube in 1987, using four-dimensional rotation as a generator of signs. Since 1995, Manfred Mohr has been part of "The Algorists" founded by Jean-Pierre Hébert and Roman Verostko. After using black and white for more than three decades, Manfred began to use color in 1998 to show the complexity of the work through differentiation. Four years later, he designed and built small PCs to run his program "space.color" and in 2004 wrote the program "subsets." The resulting images are visualized on LCD flat panels in a slow, non-repetitive motion. He then developed the program "klangfarben," which encompasses a body of paintings and animations based on the 11th dimensional hypercube using its¬†diagonal paths¬†as compositional building blocks. The program runs on a PC and the resulting images and animations are visualized in real time on two square LCD flat panels. His latest software "Artificiata II" creates digital paintings and animations that are based on the 11th to 13th dimensional hypercube and uses¬†diagonal paths¬†as graphic elements. The animation algorithm contains random variations of speed and suites of stills adding a musical rhythm to this work. This area of creative exploration of visual complexity continues to the present day.
Among his accomplishments are the Golden Nica from Ars Electronica, Linz 1990;¬†Artist Fellowship, New York Foundation of the Arts 1997; and the [ddaa] d.velop Digital Art Award, Berlin 2006. The ARC, Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris hostedthe now historic first one-person show of computer-generated digital images in 1971. Other venues for his solo shows include the Joseph Albers Museum Bottrop, Museum for Concrete Art Ingolstadt, and the Kunsthalle Bremen. The ZKM | Media Museum in Karlsruhe, Germany is currently hosting a retrospective of his work, "The Algorithm of Manfred Mohr, 1963 - now" from June 8 - September 1, 2013 and he is a Featured Artist at Art Basel 2013.
Manfred Mohr has been represented in many group shows and museums, including the SIGGRAPH Pioneering Artists; MoMA - Museum of Modern Art, New York; Centre Pompidou; ZKM¬†(Center for Art and Media); Museo Nacional Centro de Reina Sofia; MoCA - Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo;¬†Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco; New York Digital Salon, MoMA-PS1, and the Leo Castelli Gallery, New York. His work is included in the collections of the Centre Pompidou, Paris;¬†Joseph Albers Museum, Bottrop; Victoria and Albert Museum, London; Kunstmuseum Stuttgart, Stuttgart;¬†Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Kunsthalle Bremen, Bremen; Daimler Contemporary,¬†Berlin;¬†and the Musée d‚Ä∫Art Contemporain, Montreal.
ACM SIGGRAPH is honored to recognize Manfred Mohr. One of the pioneers of digital art, his exploration of n-dimensional hypercubes is a wonderful example for future artists using algorithmic techniques. His dedication to his craft, unique form of visual expression, and evolution as an artist from abstract expressionism to digital art all speak to his creative ingenuity.
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