SIGGRAPH 2024 Outstanding Doctoral Dissertation Award: Ferguson – ACM SIGGRAPH HISTORY ARCHIVES

SIGGRAPH 2024 Outstanding Doctoral Dissertation Award: Ferguson

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Awardee(s):


Award:


    Outstanding Doctoral Dissertation Award

Dissertation Title:


    Provably Robust and Accurate Methods for Rigid and Deformable Simulation with Contact

Description:


    ACM SIGGRAPH is pleased to announce Zachary Ferguson as the 2024 recipient of the Outstanding Doctoral Disseration Award. In his dissertation he presents a new method called Incremental Potential Contact (IPC) that handles collisions and contacts in an accurate, efficient and robust way. In contrast to previous approaches, the new method comes with strong theoretical guarantees that safely preventinter-penetration of objects. At the same time the method is of high practical value due to its superior computational efficiency as well as the absence of parameters that require fine tuning.

    While the rigid motion and elastic deformation of individual objects under external forces is relatively straightforward to simulate, it remains a challenge to reliably handle the interaction of dynamic objects when they touch or collide. This is due to complex constellations of penetrating objects that need to be resolved in each time step. There is a long tradition of computational approaches to detect and respondto contacts in mechanical simulations. However, state of the art methods usually require the tedious adjustment of several parameters whenever the geometry, material properties, or time steps change, making parameter studies and inverse problem settings (e.g., simulation-based shape optimization) infeasible.

    The Incremental Potential Contact method by Zachary Ferguson, in contrast, only has a single parameter that the user can tune to trade compute cost for accuracy. The robustness of the method is unconditional and not affected by this adjustment. The revolutionary method supports notoriously difficult settings with highly complex geometries, sliding friction, co-dimensional objects, extremely high velocities, and long time steps. It has the potential to considerably push the complexity limits of what can be simulated in graphics and computational engineering applications.

    The results of Zachary Ferguson’s research are not only of a theoretical nature, as he also develops reference implementations and makes them available to the research community. His software is very successful on GitHub and is used by academic and industrial research groups worldwide.

Additional Information:


    Launched in 2016, the Doctoral Dissertation Award is awarded annually to recognize a recent doctoral candidate who has successfully defended and completed his or her Ph.D. dissertation in computer graphics and interactive techniques. Recognizing young researchers who have already made a notable contribution very early during their doctoral study, the award is presented each year at the SIGGRAPH Conference and is accompanied by a plaque, complimentary full conference registration and travel to the award ceremony. Honorable Mentions may also be awarded.


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