The California Institute of Technology computer science professor is the guiding force behind multiresolution modeling and the more general field of digital geometry processing--both important contributions to the quality of the graphics we see on the Web and the three-dimensional animations we watch at the movie theater.
For his achievements in the field, Schröder has been named this year's winner of the Computer Graphics Achievement Award by the Association for Computing Machinery and the Special Interest Group on Graphics and Interactive Technology (ACM SIGGRAPH), the world's most prestigious organization for computer graphics and interactive techniques. Schröder, who also teaches applied and computational mathematics at Caltech, will receive his award on July 28 at the annual conference. The conference, which draws upward of 20,000 attendees and presenters, will be held this year at the San Diego Convention Center July 27-31.
"I'm happy to receive the honor, and I'm pleased that Caltech computer scientists have been so successful in receiving the SIGGRAPH award through the years," says Schröder, who is the fifth researcher affiliated with Caltech to have won the honor.
Schröder explains that multiresolution modeling has important consequences ranging from special effects to engineering design. The process of transmitting a curved surface in low resolution and then improving the resolution with additional data has numerous advantages for the designer who seeks to represent real-world images on-screen.
An example where surfaces of great complexity and detail play an important role are medical imaging techniques such as MRI or CT scans. A practical consequence of using multiresolution ideas would be that doctors could more readily get to the data and use it in their diagnoses.
For example, a doctor visiting a patient could someday call up MRI data at the bedside, perhaps with a personal digital assistant. For this to be practical, the data would have to be delivered over a wireless channel with limited capacity, meaning that multiresolution techniques would be necessary.
"Multiresolution techniques can spell the difference between this being possible or not," Schröder says. "There are a million other examples.
"All of these areas involve geometry," he adds. "We would like to do with digital geometry processing what digital signal processing did for sound and video."
Schröder 's teaching skills are also being indirectly honored at the ACM SIGGRAPH conference this year: one of his former postdoctoral students, Mathieu Desbrun, is this year's winner of the Significant New Researcher Award. And in an interesting coincidence, Schröder 's own former mentor, Pat Hanrahan, has been selected as recipient of this year's Steven Anson Coons Award. Hanrahan is an electrical engineering professor at Stanford University, and Desbrun is an assistant professor at the University of Southern California.
Contact: Robert Tindol (626) 395-3631
