Outstanding Doctoral Dissertation Award

Launched in 2016, the Doctoral Dissertation Award is awarded annually to recognize a recent doctoral candidate who has successfully defended and completed his or her Ph.D. dissertation in computer graphics and interactive techniques. Recognizing young researchers who have already made a notable contribution very early during their doctoral study, the award is presented each year at the SIGGRAPH Conference and is accompanied by a plaque, complimentary full conference registration and travel to the award ceremony. Honorable Mentions may also be awarded.

Current Recipient

Zachary Ferguson

For a dissertation which significantly extends the state of the art in physical simulation by presenting new groundbreaking methods to handle contacts in dynamic simulations of rigid and deformable objects

“Provably Robust and Accurate Methods for Rigid and Deformable Simulation with Contact”

ACM SIGGRAPH is pleased to announce Zachary Ferguson as the 2024 recipient of the Outstanding Doctoral Disseration Award. In his dissertation he presents a new method called Incremental Potential Contact (IPC) that handles collisions and contacts in an accurate, efficient and robust way. In contrast to previous approaches, the new method comes with strong theoretical guarantees that safely preventinter-penetration of objects. At the same time the method is of high practical value due to its superior computational efficiency as well as the absence of parameters that require fine tuning.

While the rigid motion and elastic deformation of individual objects under external forces is relatively straightforward to simulate, it remains a challenge to reliably handle the interaction of dynamic objects when they touch or collide. This is due to complex constellations of penetrating objects that need to be resolved in each time step. There is a long tradition of computational approaches to detect and respondto contacts in mechanical simulations. However, state of the art methods usually require the tedious adjustment of several parameters whenever the geometry, material properties, or time steps change, making parameter studies and inverse problem settings (e.g., simulation-based shape optimization) infeasible.

The Incremental Potential Contact method by Zachary Ferguson, in contrast, only has a single parameter that the user can tune to trade compute cost for accuracy. The robustness of the method is unconditional and not affected by this adjustment. The revolutionary method supports notoriously difficult settings with highly complex geometries, sliding friction, co-dimensional objects, extremely high velocities, and long time steps. It has the potential to considerably push the complexity limits of what can be simulated in graphics and computational engineering applications.

The results of Zachary Ferguson’s research are not only of a theoretical nature, as he also develops reference implementations and makes them available to the research community. His software is very successful on GitHub and is used by academic and industrial research groups worldwide.

 The committee also decided to award an honorable mention to Dr. Yu Wang for his outstanding work on exploring alternatives to the standard Laplace operator in geometry processing tasks as well as to Dr. Fangcheng Zhong for his exceptional dissertation in which he develops a Perceptually Realistic Graphics pipeline.

Nomination Procedure

All doctoral dissertations successfully defended (or thesis accepted) during the calendar year prior to the nomination deadline are eligible for consideration. There is no limit on the number of nominations that can be made from any single institution or advisor. The key criteria used to evaluate the nominations include technical depth, significance of the research contribution, potential impact on theory and practice, and quality of presentation.

The submitted dissertation should be a finalized version. Nominations are welcomed from any country, but only English language versions will be accepted. Nominations are evaluated by the Outstanding Doctoral Dissertation Award Committee. Nominations, including all supporting materials and endorsement letters, are due by January 31 of each year. Click the button below to submit a nomination.

Requirements