Celebrating the 2026 ACM SIGGRAPH Award Winners

[00:00:05]We are here to recognize the ACM SIGGRAPH Award winners for 2026.

[00:00:09]I am Jeff Jordan and oversee the Awards program.

[00:00:15]The Awards program recognizes the best of SIGGRAPH in the areas of technology, practice, education, arts, and service.

[00:00:24]Listed here are the awards being presented in 2026.

[00:00:28]I'd like to thank everyone that made nominations for the awards and ask that all of you consider nominating someone deserving of recognition.

[00:00:36]On the SIGGRAPH website under the Awards page, you can find directions for submitting nominations.

[00:00:42]Next, the chair of each selection committee will be introducing the award winners.

[00:00:52]>> Hello, my name is Matthew Desbrun from Inria.

[00:00:57]The SIGGRAPH Academy consists of leaders in our field whose efforts have shaped the computer graphics community.

[00:01:03]And this year we have four new inductees that I'm very proud to present to you.

[00:01:09]The first inductee is Ken Anjyo from Japan for pioneering research in blend shapes and stylized rendering and for his sustained leadership in graphics and digital production.

[00:01:20]Then we have Hongbo Fu from China for fundamental contributions to sketch-based modeling and interactive 3D content creation and for his substantial leadership in the graphics community.

[00:01:34]Then we have Ethan Grinspun from Canada for fundamental contributions to physically based animation and the development of models bridging the gap between discrete and continuous mechanics.

[00:01:45]And finally, we have Huamin Wang from China for technical contributions to point set processing and urban scale reconstruction and for sustained service to the graphics community.

[00:01:56]Please congratulate them for their accomplishments. Thank you.

[00:02:03]>> I'm Steve Marschner. I'm the chair of the SIGGRAPH Technical Awards Committee, and I'll be presenting the two technical awards.

[00:02:12]The Computer Graphics Achievement Award is given to an individual each year to recognize outstanding research contributions to computer graphics and interactive techniques.

[00:02:20]I'm pleased to present this year's award to Alexei Efros.

[00:02:25]Alyosha's work has been pivotal in shifting computer graphics from manually modeling shapes, materials, and motion to creatively reusing real-world content to today's focus on generative modeling with machine learning.

[00:02:37]His early work on data-driven texture synthesis, scene completion, and photo clip art helped establish image recombination as a fundamental primitive in computer graphics.

[00:02:46]His automated photo pop-up was among the first to demonstrate that single images could be used to create 3D scenes.

[00:02:53]Image-to-image translation, Pix2Pix, and CycleGAN nucleated the now vibrant field of generative imagery, where Alyosha continues to actively push the frontier.

[00:03:04]As well as image and scene generation, Alyosha has been at the forefront of the explosion in visual understanding over the last two decades, and has been central to the steadily deepening interplay between computer graphics and computer vision.

[00:03:16]Throughout his career, Alyosha has also generously contributed to the graphics and vision research communities on program committees, editorial boards, and as a workshop co-organizer. He's mentored more than three dozen masters, PhD, and post-doctoral fellows, many of whom are now leading researchers in their own right.

[00:03:32]Alyosha's work has truly changed our field, and I'm proud to present him this award. Please join me in congratulating Alyosha Efros.

[00:03:41]>> Hello, I'm Scott Owen, ACM SIGGRAPH Outstanding Service Award Committee Chair.

[00:03:47]In recognition of his long-term visionary and dedicated service to ACM SIGGRAPH, David Spoelstra is a 2026 Outstanding Service Award winner.

[00:03:57]David has served the ACM SIGGRAPH organization, the SIGGRAPH conference, the SIGGRAPH Asia conference, and also ACM.

[00:04:05]For the SIGGRAPH conference, David has had several positions including audio visual chair, audio visual and donations chair, electronic sports support chair. His most important contribution has been the GraphicsNet team, which he co-founded in 1997, and they built one of the first convention center fiber backbones in the US at the LA Convention Center. He was GraphicsNet chair several times, and in the years that he was not GraphicsNet chair, he was still a member of GraphicsNet. He was the executive committee representative to the SIGGRAPH Conference Advisory Group for 2022 and 2023.

[00:04:44]For the SIGGRAPH Asia conference, he conducted an early Asian tour to evaluate convention centers and negotiate networking contracts for the first SIGGRAPH Asia conferences.

[00:04:55]He was the SIGGRAPH Asia Networking Chair for the first three conferences.

[00:05:00]He's also been a member at large and an executive committee representative to the SIGGRAPH Asia Conference Advisory Group for several years.

[00:05:08]For his organizational leadership in the past few years, he's bounced between being treasurer elect and treasurer, and has been on the finance committee since 2021. He's been a governance advisory board member since 2022.

[00:05:23]Uh this coming September, he will accept the role of past treasurer, and a year from now in 2027, he will become the next governance advisory board chair. He was also computer chair for ACM '97. For all of these service activities, David well deserves the Outstanding Service Award.

[00:05:43]>> Hi, I'm Barbara Mones. I'm the chair of the Distinguished Educator award committee. The committee is thrilled to select James Foley as our 2026 awardee.

[00:05:53]As educator, researcher, innovator, leader, and pioneer in computer graphics and human-computer interaction HCI, Jim stands out for his stellar contributions to educators, researchers, and industry professionals over nearly five decades.

[00:06:12]Jim was the senior author of textbooks that were the basis for many college-level courses in computer graphics worldwide. The books Fundamentals of Interactive Computer Graphics and Computer Graphics Principles and Practice were revered by students and educators who enthusiastically welcomed them. His books were translated into many languages and sold nearly half a million copies. In addition to the success of these books in undergraduate and graduate curricula, they were also standard references for many researchers and industrial practitioners.

[00:06:46]Jim taught university-level courses for most of his life, starting with the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, then George Washington University in the District of Columbia, and most recently for 26 years at the Georgia Institute of Technology.

[00:07:01]He has taught over 100 computer graphics and HCI short courses around the world, including at many SIGGRAPH conferences.

[00:07:11]Jim founded the highly regarded interdisciplinary Georgia Tech Graphics, Visualization, and Usability GVU Center, where he led research efforts and developed new curricula to support the evolving fields of human-computer interaction and human-centered computing, helping to establish human-oriented concerns as legitimate subdisciplines within computer science.

[00:07:35]As an administrator, Jim served as chair of EE and CS at George Washington University and interim dean at the College of Computing at Georgia Tech. As an academic, he has served as chair of the Computing Research Association, as vice chair of SIGGRAPH, and on various national international advisory boards.

[00:07:56]Jim received lifetime achievement awards both from ACM SIGGRAPH and ACM SIGCHI, computer human interaction, as well as multiple teaching awards from Georgia Tech.

[00:08:08]The Distinguished Educator Award Committee is proud to recognize James Foley as our 2026 awardee for his academic excellence, innovation in teaching and research, successful pioneering efforts in multiple areas of computer science, his generous volunteer contributions to ACM SIGGRAPH, and most of all, for his dedication and commitment to students.

[00:08:35]>> Hi, I'm Leif Kobbelt from RWTH Aachen University in Germany.

[00:08:41]The ACM SIGGRAPH Outstanding Doctoral Dissertation Award Jury is proud to announce Guy Tevet as the winner of this year's dissertation award.

[00:08:50]He receives this award for pioneering a unified framework for human motion generation that combines generative AI and physics-based control by integrating diffusion models with simulation, enabling real-time text-guided characters that interact plausibly with their environment.

[00:09:09]Guy Tevet's dissertation represents a landmark contribution to computer graphics, animation, and generative modeling.

[00:09:17]Rather than presenting a collection of disconnected papers, the thesis advances a coherent research agenda, making high-quality human motion generation controllable, accessible, physically realistic, and broadly useful across research and production settings.

[00:09:34]The overall impact of this dissertation is truly exceptional.

[00:09:38]It inspired a large body of follow-up research and connected the advances in machine learning with practical needs of animators and embodied AI systems.

[00:09:50]Guy Habitat thesis defines a research program that has already transformed the field and will continue to shape it for the years to come.

[00:10:00]The award jury also decided to give two honorable mentions. The first goes to Bodin Mondal Dwin Kaja for a dissertation that establishes a fundamentally new approach to integrate human performance into the evaluation and optimization of interactive graphic systems.

[00:10:18]And the second honorable mention goes to Ethan Tseng for his dissertation in which he developed next generation computational imaging and display systems in co-design with modern machine learning methods.

[00:10:34]>> Today we present the 2026 SIGGRAPH Distinguished Artist Award for Lifetime Achievement in Digital Art to Claudia Hart.

[00:10:42]Hart has made influential contributions to digital art, media theory, and experimental practice, particularly through her pioneering work in virtual, augmented, and mixed reality, as well as her critical exploration of embodiment, feminism, and simulation through historically grounded digital media.

[00:11:00]She situates digital simulation within a long continuum of representation extending from Renaissance perspective through photography to virtual reality and synthetic worlds.

[00:11:12]As a feminist artist, Hart speaks in the voices of patriarchs. She expands on tropes borrowed from canonical philosophers, poets, and painters.

[00:11:22]In her first analog exhibitions, she impersonated Rousseau, Byron, and Machiavelli.

[00:11:29]When she reinvented herself as a digital artist, she was concerned solely with virtual simulations she called post-photography.

[00:11:37]Hart then continued to channel history, viewing her animations, experimental theater, and VR and AR work as simulated historical enactments in an artificial world.

[00:11:48]Long before debates around AI-generated imagery and synthetic realism became widespread, Hart's work critically examined how digital systems construct perception, encode ideology, and reshape subjectivity.

[00:12:04]For the 2026 Pixel Pioneers exhibition at the Depot Museum in Rotterdam, Hart was commissioned to create the works Failed Empire and The Rise and Fall of Art and Other Histories, both immersive installations that explore how digital systems shape belief and value by reimagining failed cryptocurrencies as the ruins of a technological empire.

[00:12:28]Please welcome Claudia Hart.

[00:12:32]>> Hi, I'm Rachel Rose, this year's committee chair for the ACM SIGGRAPH Practitioner Award.

[00:12:38]I am pleased today to recognize Florian Kainz with this year's SIGGRAPH Practitioner Award. Since 2018, this award has recognized practitioners throughout our community who have had a significant impact on computer graphics and interactive techniques.

[00:12:53]Florian's work is a testament to his impact across an incredibly broad range of domains. Spanning a 19-year tenure at Industrial Light & Magic, Florian cemented his legacy as a master practitioner by developing several of the visual effects industry's most robust and enduring tools. He served as the architect behind the OpenEXR high dynamic range image format. It's nearly universal adoption and continued use, even 20 years later, was driven by his clean and concise open-source reference implementation and his focus on always maintaining image quality in the the Florian has contributed to the precision engineering of IMM's internal OBQ and Zeno tools that influence work throughout the industry.

[00:13:37]Beyond his work in film production, Florian has recently made pioneering contributions to computational photography during his time at Google and Adobe, particularly in advancing low-light, nighttime, and astronomical mobile photography.

[00:13:52]Florian's wide-ranging and often elegant engineering, combined with his ability to translate complex technical concepts into accessible language for others, is inspirational within the broader graphics community.

[00:14:06]So, on behalf of this year's award committee, I am very proud to present Florian Kaints with this year's 2026 SIGGRAPH Practitioner Award.

[00:14:17]>> The Significant New Researcher Award is given annually to a person who has made significant research contributions early in their career.

[00:14:24]I'm pleased to present this year's award to Lingjie Liu.

[00:14:28]Lingjie's research center is on neural methods for 3D computer graphics and computer vision.

[00:14:34]In neural scene representation, her research on neural sparse voxel fields was among the first to use efficient sparse representations to accelerate the rendering of neural radiance fields.

[00:14:43]She also contributed to the influential methods News and News 2, which showed how to combine the smoothness of volume rendering and the definition of implicit surfaces to efficiently and accurately reconstruct surfaces from images.

[00:14:56]Together, these contributions substantially advance neural graphics and established practical and geometrically faithful approaches to image-based 3D reconstruction.

[00:15:04]In 3D generation, Lingjie contributed to a number of pioneering advances in 2D and 3D generative AI, including Style NeRF, SyncDreamer, and Wonder 3D, projects that harnessed image generation models to efficiently create high-fidelity 3D content from single images.

[00:15:21]Lingjie has also made significant contributions to human performance capture and animation.

[00:15:26]In particular, her work on neural actor starts from multi-view video and models pose and view-dependent deformation and appearance to enable photorealistic free viewpoint rendering.

[00:15:36]In PhysHMR, she unified video-based motion capture with physics-based character animation, creating realistic human motion directly from video input via a learned control policy.

[00:15:47]With these early and influential contributions, Lingjie already has made a big impact, and with her research group at the University of Pennsylvania, she continues to change the field.

[00:15:56]Please join me in congratulating Lingjie Liu.