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The ACM SIGGRAPH Significant New Researcher Award is presented
annually to a researcher who is new to the field, and has made a
recent significant contribution to computer graphics.
This year's recipient, Ravi Ramamoorthi, Associate Professor of
Computer Science at Columbia University, is being honored for his
groundbreaking work on mathematical representations and computational
models for the visual appearance of objects.
Ravi's work has had an enormous impact in areas ranging from real-time
rendering to appearance modeling, to acquisition and representation of
visual appearance. In the tradition of the best graphics researchers,
Ravi combines foundational mathematical analysis with novel practical
algorithms. His discoveries have led to a deeper understanding of
appearance and a number of them are being adopted by the industry.
Ravi received both his Bachelor's and Master's degrees in computer
science and physics at Caltech, where he published two Siggraph papers
from his work there with Al Barr and Jim Arvo. Ravi then studied at
Stanford University with Pat Hanrahan. His PhD disseration and
SIGGRAPH 2001 paper used ideas from signal-processing to establish a
firm mathematical framework to describe reflection in terms of
convolution, where the incident radiance plays the role of a signal
and the bi-directional reflection distribution function (BRDF) of a
surface plays the role of a filter. He went on to derive an
explicit convolution product formula in the frequency domain using
spherical harmonics. This work represents a mathematical tour de
force, addressing long-standing problems in graphics and computer
vision.
Ravi continued his study of the reflection operator with his SIGGRAPH
2004 paper with Ren Ng and Pat Hanrahan on Triple Product Integrals, a
theme that has continued with several subsequent papers, two of which
appear in the SIGGRAPH 2007 proceedings. Currently, much of Ravi's
work involves data-driven methods, including 5 papers from SIGGRAPH 2006
that dealt with a variety of issues, from the measurement and
representation of complex time-varying phenomena to real-time editing
of BRDFs.
Ravi has made deep and broad contributions to the twin fields of
graphics and computer vision. He has shown exceptional levels of
productivity, being one of the most prolific recent contributors to
SIGGRAPH. For these reasons, Ravi Ramamoorthi is presented the ACM
SIGGRAPH Significant New Researcher Award.