Associate Professor Alec Jacobson is a 2022 recipient of the Outstanding Early Career Computer Science Research Award from CS-Can/Info-Can.
Associate Professor Alec Jacobson of the University of Toronto’s Department of Computer Science is a 2022 recipient of the Outstanding Early Career Computer Science Research Award from Computer Science Canada/Informatique Canada (CS-Can/Info-Can), Canada’s national academic organization for computer science.
This award recognizes CS faculty members at Canadian universities within 10 years of their PhD who have made significant contributions early in their academic careers, particularly to research.
Jacobson’s research is a blend of computational geometry, graphics, vision, machine learning and human-computer interaction. His key contributions to geometry processing research include shape deformations, robust mesh tetrahedralization and more recently, deep learning functions. This work has had a significant impact on diverse fields including architecture, structural engineering and theatre.
Jacobson’s research is rethinking geometry processing, producing results that are both theoretically fundamental and have had strong practical impact. He has enabled volumetric processing and meshing of surface geometry “in the wild,” using a 3D generalization of the classic winding number concept, implemented in TetWild, the first tetrahedral meshing algorithm to be validated on a large scale on a set of 10,000 unprocessed real-world meshes. This entire line of work is now a feature in Autodesk Maya, the pre-eminent and Oscar-winning commercial software for modelling and animation. Another example of Jacobson’s research in this domain is his mesh Boolean library used at Disney/Pixar and is a featured tool in the software Houdini, used at major film studios.
He also led the development of libigl, a geometry processing library that is widely used in both academia and industry.
In his early career, Jacobson has already published over 40 papers in top venues in computer graphics (ACM TOG/SIGGRAPH), computer vision (CVPR), human-computer interaction (ACM SIGCHI) and machine learning (NeurIPS). Overall, he has more than 120 communications to his name, including posters, courses and reports.
He was the technical program co-chair for the Symposium on Geometry Processing 2020, the premier conference for the geometry processing community, and is an Associate Editor of the primary computer graphics journal, the ACM Transactions on Graphics.
In addition to his research and academic leadership contributions, Jacobson has served as a valuable mentor. In 2020, when most research programs were severely impeded and conferences cancelled due to the COVID-19 pandemic, he initiated the Toronto Geometry Colloquium, an online research web series to serve as a platform for underrepresented researchers. It has quickly established itself as a key venue for sharing and disseminating work in geometry processing for veterans and student researchers alike.