06/08/2024

IMPA is featured in yet another edition of SIGGRAPH.

The conference “Special Interest Group on Graphics and Interactive Techniques” (SIGGRAPH) concluded on August 1st with outstanding results for IMPA. Held in Denver, USA, the leading event in computer graphics and interactive media awarded former IMPA student Adriana Schulz with the "Significant New Researcher Award" – the highest recognition in the field offered to early-career researchers.

Adriana, who holds a Master's degree from IMPA, collaborated with Visgraf (IMPA's Computer Graphics Laboratory) and was selected due to "exceptional contributions to interactive 3D design tools for physical artifacts." "Adriana's many contributions include a design tool, for example, that allows novice users to build complex physical objects, such as furniture and go-karts, using parts and models derived from existing designs," highlights the SIGGRAPH website.

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Adriana holds a Bachelor's degree in Electronic Engineering from UFRJ and a PhD in Computer Science from MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology). Currently, she is an assistant professor at the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Washington and a member of the UW Graphics and Imaging Lab (GRAIL). She is also co-director of the UW Digital Fabrication Center (DFab).

Another highlight of the event was Alexandre Chapiro, who is also a former master's student at IMPA, and whose work "PEA-PODs: Perceptual evaluation of algorithms for energy optimization in XR displays" was included in the selection of best papers and honorable mentions. A PhD holder from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich (Switzerland), Chapiro is currently a research scientist at Meta, the company that owns Facebook.

At the conference poster session, IMPA doctoral student Hallison da Paz presented his thesis work, "Spectral Periodic Networks for Neural Rendering." The work showcased an implicit neural representation (INR) to describe periodic signals in neural rendering. In 2023, Hallison completed a six-month internship at Meta. The IMPA doctoral student even compared the institute's output to that of the American company. He spent a semester in the laboratory located in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, developing avatars for the company's future metaverse.

Furthermore, two other former students of the institute, Fernando de Goes and Cristina Vasconcelos, presented the works “Stochastic Computation of Barycentric Coordinates” and “Blue noise for diffusion models”, respectively, in the “Technical Program”.

Goes, who has already been awarded the SciTech Oscar for developing a system to simulate the dynamics of elastic objects used in several of the studio's productions, this time explained the construction of the characters' hair in the film Inside Out 2. Cristina presented a proposal that envisions a time-varying noise model to incorporate correlated noise into the training process.