Asiagraphics Outstanding Technical Contributions Award (2020)

The 2020 AG’s Outstanding Technical Contributions Award was presented to Prof. Takeo Igarashi, who is a Professor of Computer Science at The Univ. of Tokyo since 2011. 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). The award ceremony will be held next year at one of the AG conferences (i.e. PG, GMP or CVM).

Prof. Igarashi’s most significant achievement in his early career is a 3D sketching system, where the user interactively draws a silhouette of a model and the system automatically generates a 3D model. It was selected as one of SIGGRAPH 1999 Impact Papers. This work was particularly important because it is one of the first systems claiming “3D modeling for novice users”. 3D modeling has been considered as a task for professionals. However, Prof. Igarashi has envisioned the future where everyone uses 3D graphics as a daily communication tool and showed its potential with his system. Such a vision is highly original and has led to various forms of technical breakthroughs. Since then, various commercial services and applications emerged for non-professional users to engage in content creation and we can see the influence of his vision. Prof Igarashi’s interactive design tools are considered as one of the important and unique contributions to the field. He has received ACM SIGGRAPH significant new researcher award for these achievements.

Prof. Igarashi has been emphasizing the importance of human-computer interaction in solving computer graphics problems, and it has been influencing many fellow researchers and practitioners in our community. In addition to publish many papers at top-tier venues, he has educated educating countless number of young researchers as a supervisor or a mentor (he has 316 co-authors according to dblp). He has served for the research community in various forms such as program chairs (CHI 2021, SIGGRAPH ASIA 2018, UIST 2013, PG 2008), conference chairs (UIST 2016), and program committee members (SIGGRAPH, UIST, CHI, etc.). These records show the significance of his leadership and technical contributions in the field.