Asiagraphics Outstanding Technical Contributions Award (2021)

The 2021 Asiagraphics (AG) Outstanding Technical Contributions Award was presented to Prof. Wenping Wang from both Texas A&M University, USA and The University of Hong Kong, China. 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).

Prof. Wenping Wang has been conducting research in computer graphics, with emphasis on geometric modeling and computing, for over 30 years. He has made fundamental contributions in mesh generation, curve and surface fitting, architectural geometry, and collision detection.

Prof. Wang has worked on a number of topics in geometric modeling and computing. His studies on centroidal Voronoi diagrams led to efficient algorithms for various applications in mesh generation and point sampling.  He developed simple and efficient methods for fitting B-spline curves and surfaces to point cloud data. He contributed to several seminal works on architectural geometry in a series of SIGGRAPH papers. He was the first to introduce algebraic methods for fast and precise collision detection for ellipsoids, which are widely used for modeling granular materials in simulation or as bounding volumes for collision detection in virtual reality. For his contributions to geometric modeling, Professor Wang received the John Gregory Memorial Award and was elected IEEE Fellow in 2017.

Prof. Wang has greatly contributed to the computer graphics community with his professional services and leadership. He has served on the editorial board of eight journals and co-chaired over 20 conferences, including Geometric Modeling and Processing (GMP) 2000, Pacific Graphics 2012, SIAM Conference on Geometric and Physical Modeling 2013, SIGGRAPH Asia 2013, and Geometry Summit 2019. He has been Steering Committee Chair for the GMP conference and the Pacific Graphics conference. Professor Wang played a pivotal role in establishing the Asia Graphics (AG) Association and was elected Founding Chairman of AG from 2016 to 2020.