Assistant Professor Alec Jacobson has received the 2020 Significant New Researcher Award from ACM SIGGRAPH in recognition of his outstanding contributions to geometry processing.

Among the highest honours for early career researchers in computer graphics, this annual award recognizes someone who has already made distinguished contributions and is poised to make more.

One of the major themes in Jacobson’s research is making computer graphics algorithms robust to ‘noisy’ data collected in the real world.

Many computer graphics algorithms are borrowed from disciplines such as mathematics, and as a result, might operate under the assumption that a given shape has a perfectly smooth surface and is free of any artifacts. Burdened with messy data, these algorithms can break down.

Jacobson, the Canada Research Chair in Geometry Processing, developed a method to ensure that these algorithms “gracefully degrade” under these constraints, rather than breaking down quickly with destructive results.

Jacobson's work in geometry processing studies how to represent and manipulate 3D shapes on the computer. This velociraptor shape is formed and unformed by packing spheres within its surface.

He also developed an innovative approach to real-time shape deformation, which has been implemented in both open-source and commercial software, including Adobe Character Animator.

The beneficiaries of Jacobson’s research into simulating the physical behaviour of shapes span a wide range of disciplines and industries, from medical engineers simulating the human anatomy to 3D animators bringing characters to life for movies and games.

In addition to the broad theoretical and practical impact of his research, Jacobson is involved with significant open-source efforts as a lead on the C++ library libigl, which is used by tens of thousands of developers in academia and industry.