Asiagraphics Young Researcher Award (2018)

The Asia Graphics Association (AG) is proud to announce the winner of the first Young Researcher Award (2018). This award is to recognize young researchers early on in their career (not longer than 6 years after obtaining the PhD degree), who have made a recently, notable contribution to the field of computer graphics and interactive techniques, in an Asiagraphics country. 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) and the Award Jury has come to the unanimous decision. The winner received his certificate on 16th December, during the ACM SIGGRAPH ASIA 2018 held in Tokyo, Japan.

The 2018 AG’s Young Researcher Award was presented to Dr. Nobuyuki Umetani, who obtained his B.S. at Mechanical Engineering and his PhD degree at Computer Science, both from the University of Tokyo, in 2012. Since then, he worked at Autodesk Research, Canada, and Disney Research Zürich, Switzerland. Starting from July 2018, he became a project lecturer at the University of Tokyo, Japan.

Dr. Nobuyuki has been working in the field of computer graphics for about 8 years. Throughout these years, Nobuyuki did various innovative researches that inspired the community. Especially, he is one of the pioneers in the field of computational fabrication.

Dr. Nobuyuki has a unique academic background: he has a degree of mechanical engineering and one of the computer science. With this interdisciplinary background, his research interest is at the intersection of the engineering and computer graphics. In other words, he applies advanced computer graphics algorithms for simulation and geometry processing into the computational design and fabrication of the real-world objects. Computational fabrication is a very popular research subject but when he started the computational fabrication research, this topic was still rare in the computer graphics community. Nobuyuki played a leading role in the advancement of this field.

Dr. Nobuyuki’s main contribution is the studies for interactive design interface incorporating physics simulation. He presented several interactive design systems where the real-time simulation guides the designer for the better design. He demonstrated that with such a real-time feedback from simulation, the non-expert users can easily design highly customized unique objects. Various design problems, which are previously thought very difficult, such as fashion design, furniture design, airplane design, kite design, wind instrument design, and aerodynamic object design were made possible with his approaches.

One another direction Dr. Nobuyuki explored is a data-driven approach for the physically valid design. Many physics simulation are very slow to perform in a real-time environment, thus it is very challenging to integrate them into the interactive application. This problem is very significant in the aerodynamically functional object design such as airplanes or automobile designs. Nobuyuki successfully uses a data-driven approach where the simulation result is estimated from precomputed data.

Dr. Nobuyuki has a prolific publication record: he authored seven SIGGRAPH or SIGGRAPH Asia papers as the first author and co-authored one SIGGRAPH paper. He contributed to the community by serving on as a committee member for many conferences including the top conferences such as SIGGRAPH and CHI. With these significant contributions, he was qualified for the Young Researcher Award of AsiaGraphics.