Asiagraphics Outstanding Technical Contributions Award (2023)

The 2023 Asiagraphics (AG) Outstanding Technical Contributions Award was presented to Professor Ariel Shamir from Reichman University, Israel. The winner of this award was selected by the award jury chaired by Prof. Ming Lin (UMD College Park) and Prof. Leif Kobbelt (RWTH Aachen).

Ariel Shamir is a professor at the Efi Arazi school of Computer Science at Reichman University, Israel. He received a B.Sc. and M.Sc. degrees in math and computer science Cum Laude from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, and a Ph.D. in computer science in 2000. After that, he spent two years as a postdoctoral fellow at the computational visualization center at the University of Texas in Austin. His research interests include geometric modeling, computer graphics, fabrication, visualization, and machine learning.

Some of his most notable works include “seam-carving for image resizing”, which was included in the list of seminal graphics papers of the last 25 years, “sketch-to-photo” that presented a method to convert sketches to photographs before the deep learning era, “3Sweep” that provided a tool to convert images of objects to 3D models using simple sweep gestures interface. More recently, a best papers award was presented in SIGGRAPH 2022 to CLIPasso, a method that allows converting images to sketches in multiple level of abstractions, and a best papers award honorable mention in SIGGRAPH 2023 for Word-as-Image, a method that allows automatic creation of semantic illustrations of words while keeping their shape, typographic-style and legibility.

In all these examples, Ariel has managed to demonstrate highly creative works, which are many times surprising – opening up new research directions and inspiring follow-up works. He has an H-Index of 57 in google scholar, with more than 14,000 citations to date. His work often focuses on developing algorithms and techniques to manipulate and analyze both images and video as well as geometric data, which has applications in various industries including entertainment, design, and manufacturing.

Ariel has published close to 200 research papers and articles in reputable conferences and journals in the field such as ACM SIGGRAPH, ACM SIGGRAPH-ASIA, CVPR, ICCV, Eurographics, ACM TOG , IEEE TVCG, Computer Graphics Forum and CVMJ.

Ariel is also known as a leader in the field for his ability to foster fruitful collaborations with other research groups worldwide, many of which are in the Asia area including with China, Korea and Japan. He has served or is serving as an Associate Editor of ACM TOG, IEEE TVCG, CVMJ, Computers & Graphics, and Graphical Models. He is also serving now as the papers-chair for SIGGRAPH-ASIA 2024 to be held in Tokyo, Japan.