Zhiqin Chen The winner of the 2023 Alain Fournier Award for Outstanding Doctoral Dissertation in Computer Graphics is Zhiqin Chen from Simon Fraser University, supervised by Hao Zhang.
Zhiqin’s PhD work is extremely impressive. From a productivity standpoint he has published three first author SIGGRAPH papers, four first author CVPR papers, several ICCV papers — amongst other work on which he is not the first author. The amount of work is quite honestly, staggering, enough for several PhDs. Beyond that productivity, Zhiqin helped introduce neural fields for shape representation to graphics and vision in his paper “Learning Implicit Fields for Generative Shape Modeling”. This paper has been cited over 1400 times since 2018 and the neural field representation that it helped popularize (alongside concurrent works DeepSDF and OccupancyMaps) has become a fundamental tool in every discipline of computer graphics – from rendering, to shape modelling, to simulation. He is described by his supervisor Hao Zhang as the best PhD student he has worked with in 20+ years. All of this shows just what a monumental achievement his thesis is, and that he is a researcher truly deserving of this award.