The 2021 CHCCS/SCDHM Achievement Award for computer graphics is presented to Professor Pierre Poulin for his long-term contributions to the field. Dr. Poulin has made lasting and varied contributions to computer graphics over the past thirty years, in areas spanning rendering, modeling, and animation. He has further been a leader in building the graphics research community over this time via research mentorship and sustained organizational efforts in support of computer graphics research in Canada and in Europe.
Dr. Poulin has contributed numerous advances to rendering models and algorithms. His early work on an anisotropic reflection model was a key step in showing that more sophisticated surface reflection models were a necessary and feasible step towards achieving high-quality rendered imagery, to which he later contributed with a number of reflection models. His work on linear light sources, light hierarchies, virtual relighting, and global illumination all helped establish a path to increasingly ambitious efforts in physically-based rendering. He is a co-author of a classical and influential survey of shadow algorithms, and 20 years later of a follow-up book with his friend and collaborator Andrew Woo. Dr. Poulin has further done notable work in animation, including water in its many forms (fluids, waves, waterfalls, droplets), fire and smoke, hair motion, and mocap compression and motif identification. Rounding out his diverse contributions to computer graphics are methods for procedural modeling of buildings and environments, surface weathering, and various systems for image-based modeling and rendering. A continuous theme has been to bring together realism, simulation, efficiency, hierarchies, and user control to benefit creators.
He has served the community in numerous ways, including as CHCCS vice president since 2002, and now treasurer, as well GRAND team leader. Dr. Poulin co-launched in 2005 and served since then on the Alain Fournier Award for the best Doctoral Dissertation in Computer Graphics, which is funded by donations in honour of his supervisor, Dr. Alain Fournier. He has supervised many in computer graphics, including 19 Ph.D. students, 44 M.Sc. students, and 28 Master students from Europe. He has co-chaired conferences including GI 2000, CGI 2011, Eurographics 2013, and CASA 2014, served on editorial boards of C&G, CGF, and CAVW, and participated on 64 international program committees. He has been a driver of collaborations with multiple computer graphics research labs and colleagues in France, resulting in many bidirectional exchanges.
Dr. Poulin is a Professor with the Département d’informatique et de recherche opérationnelle (DIRO) at the Université de Montréal, where he has been faculty since 1994. He has served as the department Director since 2017, where he has helped hire 11 new faculty members, and guided DIRO through the major expansion of Mila and machine learning, the doubling of the population of most of its computer science programs, the COVID-19 crisis, and plans for a new building. Dr. Poulin earned his B.Sc. at Laval University in 1986, an M.Sc. at the University of Toronto in 1989, and he obtained his Ph.D. from the University of British Columbia. He was a post-doctoral fellow at Princeton with Prof. Pat Hanrahan.