Asiagraphics Young Researcher Award (2019)

The Asia Graphics Association (AG) is proud to announce the winner of the Young Researcher Award (2019). 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). The winner received her certificate on 5th September, during the Computational Visual Media (CVM 2020) held as an online conference.

The 2019 AG’s Young Researcher Award was presented to Dr. Ruizhen Hu, who obtained her PhD in 2015 from Zhejiang University, China. From 2012 to 2014, she spent two years visiting Simon Fraser University, Canada. She now is an Assistant Professor at Shenzhen University, China. Her research interests are in computer graphics, with a recent focus on applying machine learning to advance the understanding and generative modeling of visual data including 3D shapes and indoor scenes.

With a strong background in mathematics, Ruizhen’s earlier works were mainly on solving new variants of classical geometry problems such as decomposition, grouping, and folding, which were motivated by emerging applications from design and 3D printing. Of particular note is her 2014 paper on approximate pyramidal shape decomposition, which is also her first ACM TOG paper. This work has brought a fundamental shape property, pyramidality, to light, where pyramidal shapes happen to be optimal for FDM-based 3D printing. To date, Ruizhen’s most cited work is her first paper, presented at SGP 2012, on co-segmentation of 3D shapes. This work proposed a novel idea of treating 3D shape co-segmentation as a subspace clustering problem, which has inspired many follow-up works and collected close to 150 citations.

Since 2015, Ruizhen has produced a series of fundamental and ground-breaking works on describing, analyzing, and learning functional properties of 3D objects. She is clearly a recognized leader on this topic. We, as humans, live in a 3D world and our daily activities are dominated by actions on and interactions with 3D objects that surround us based on the functionalities that they can afford. Hence the ultimate goal of shape understanding by a machine, if such a machine is to replace or complement human capacities, is at the functional level. This fact clearly highlights the importance of Ruizhen’s works on functionality and the computer graphics community has certainly recognized it: in each year since 2015, Ruizhen has published a first-author SIGGRAPH or SIGGRAPH Asia paper on this topic.

The problems and solutions in Ruizhen’s works are highly original, and she is also productive, having published 13 papers, 9 as first author, in SIGGRAPH/SIGGRAPH Asia/TOG, in a short five-year span. With her amazing production and contributions in such a short time, Ruizhen has already been invited to serve on as a committee member for many conferences including the top conferences such as SIGGRAPH, SIGGRAH Asia, and Eurographics. She has also become an associate editor of The Visual Computer and IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications.