Ibraheem Alhashim is the recipient of the 2015 Alain Fournier Ph.D. Dissertation Award. His dissertation, entitled “Topology-Varying Shape Matching and Modeling”, made exceptional research contributions to computer graphics, which will impact the field for years to come.

The thesis makes important contributions in the area of topology-varying shape correspondence and interpolation, enabling an entirely new set of shape synthesis options for plausible and nontrivial shape inbetweens. Earlier approaches have been successful in dealing with rigid alignments, near-isometric shape articulations, or nonrigid shape deformations involving part stretching. But what separates Ibraheem’s work from the state of the art is that for the first time, topological variations are brought into the equation. This allows the matching and interpolation of shapes that differ in their fundamental topology. Ibraheem’s work on deformation-driven topology-varying shape correspondence provides an unsupervised solution, where the key contribution is a novel deformation energy that drives the search for a best part correspondence. These results have appeared in multiple prominent venues and promise to have a significant influence on the many varied fields that now utilize 3D models.