Alain Fournier Award

Maria (Masha) Shugrina

2020 Alain Fournier Ph.D. Dissertation Award

Maria (Masha) Shugrina is the recipient of the 2020 Alain Fournier PhD Dissertation Award. Her dissertation, entitled “The Design of Playful and Intelligent Creative Tools”, combines artistic insight and artificial intelligence to create new interactive tools for artistic expression.

Digital technology offers an unprecedented ability to craft our own creative media, and machine intelligence holds boundless potential for empowering creativity. This drives Dr. Shugrina’s exploration of design and research to fashion creative tools. Specifically, her thesis makes strong contributions to the representation and exploration of color, as well as provides benchmarks for the evaluation of computer vision techniques, such as feature tracking for artistic applications. She approaches color interfaces from an interaction perspective, inspired by the 2D painting of artists, and from an artificial intelligence perspective derived from hand-drawn animation.

Dr. Shugrina’s passion for enhancing human creativity is solidly anchored in multidisciplinary research. While the primary impact of her PhD contributions are centered on graphics, it has the unique achievement of being published as first author in the top-tier venues of three major domains, including twice at SIGGRAPH (graphics), CVPR (computer vision), and CHI (human computer interaction).

Dr. Shugrina obtained her Bachelor of Arts in Computer Science with a Minor in Mathematics from Boston University in 2007, graduating Summa cum laude, with a College Prize for Excellence in Computer Science. In 2015 she obtained her Masters of Science in Computer Science and Electrical Engineering from MIT working on Methods Enabling Interactive Customization of Fabricable Objects by Non-Professional. She graduated in 2020 with her PhD in Computer Science from the University of Toronto under the supervision of Profs. Karan Singh and Sanja Fidler. During her PhD studies, she was a part-time consultant at NVIDIA Research and Adobe Research.