Alain Fournier Award

Chakravarty R. Alla Chaitanya

2019 Alain Fournier Ph.D. Dissertation Award

Chakravarty R. Alla Chaitanya is the recipient of the 2019 Alain Fournier Ph.D. Dissertation Award. His dissertation, entitled “Robust Numerical Solutions to High-dimensional Physics-based Integration Problems”, addressed several important problems in the areas of Monte Carlo-based light transport simulations, learning-based image denoising, and interactive acoustic simulation.

The problem of efficiently computing the light and sound transport in complex environments is fundamental to a wide range of applications, and it is the focus of intense research activities, both in academic and industrial settings. Dr. Chaitanya’s work in this area made several high impact breakthroughs resulting in several top-level publications as well as successful technology transfer to the public domain and in commercial products. In the first contribution of his dissertation, he proposes a new light path sampling approach that is much more robust than other state-of-the-art methods when applied to radiometrically complex scenes. He released his code to the open-source domain in order for the research community to have easy access to this new method. Next, in his dissertation, he proposes a machine learning-based image denoising architecture tailored to the nature of Monte Carlo-based image synthesis algorithms. In this method, he employs a customized recurrent image denoising architecture, coupled with a novel temporally-coherent patch-based training methodology. His method outperformed the state-of-the-art in both accuracy and performance by several orders of magnitude, and it is incorporated in NVIDIA’s OptiX ray tracing package. Last but not least, in his last part of his dissertation, he applied his acquired expertise and insights on light transport to the field of interactive acoustic simulation. In this context, he developed a novel adaptive sampler that leveraged symmetries in the problem in order to improve the performance of existing methods – without sacrificing accuracy – by an order of magnitude.

Dr. Chaitanya’s multidisciplinary research accomplishments are an inspiration to new generations of students that are looking to models to shape up their careers. Not only has Dr. Chaitanya published several highly cited articles in top-tier journals and conferences, but he accomplished a rare high level of technology transfer both in the public domain as well as in state-of-the-art commercial products.

Dr. Chaitanya obtained his B.Tech. in Computer Science and Information Technology from Jawaharlal Nehru Technological University in 2004, his M.A.Sc. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from The University of British Columbia in 2008 and his Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from McGill University in 2019 under the supervision of Prof. Derek Nowrouzezahrai. During his Ph.D. studies, he completed research internships at NVIDIA Research and Microsoft Research, and he was a visiting scholar at the University of Tokyo. He has received departmental and faculty excellence awards at the Université de Montréal and McGill University. He now works at Facebook Reality Labs as a Research Scientist, where he continues to apply his skill set to advance the state-of-the-art in problems in the interactive virtual and augmented reality domains.