SIGGRAPH 2009 Significant New Researcher Award: Matusik
Awardee(s):
Award:
- Significant New Researcher Award
Description:
ACM SIGGRAPH is pleased to award the 2009 Significant New Researcher award to Wojciech Matusik, in recognition of his original and decisive contributions to computer graphics, particularly in the area of data-Orivcn material representations and innovative systems for data acquisition and display.
Wojciech obtained a B.S. from the University of California at Berkeley, an M.S . from M.I.T. in 2001, then a Ph.D. from M.I.T. in 2003. He worked at Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories before joining Adobe Systems, lnc. in 2007. His first SIGGRAPH papers illustrated the convergence of computer graphics and computer vision techniques to produce 3D representations of real objects, including those with specular and fuzzy materials, from multiple cameras. He moved on to the difficult problem of acquiring and manipulating material representations, allowing the acquired objects to be illuminated synthetically. His research addressed both the compression and manipulation of BRDF data as well as specialized capture techniques for materials such as skin or hair. He also worked on 3D television systems, extending his model acquisition techniques with appropriate coding and autostereoscopic display systems. In addition to pursuing these lines of research he has recently made contributions to computational photography.
Wojciech’s work on materials represents a comprehensive set of important advances: starting from very detailed measurements of material reflectance properties, he developed compression and factorization techniques that allow easy synthesis of existing or new materials. He applied similar ideas to the decomposition of complex reflectance functions (such as those that arc spatially- or temporally-varying, or those with heterogeneous subsurface scattering) into simpler components. interestingly he now seeks to apply a similar data-driven and component-based approach to the creation of virtual humans .
Wojciech clearly has a personal and original vision of research in computer graphics, and the talent to develop this vision into real scientific contributions. We arc extremely pleased to recognize this promising talent with the 2009 Significant New Researcher Award.
Source:
- ACM SIGGRAPH Citation
