Computer Graphics Achievement Award

The computer graphics achievement award is given to an individual for outstanding achievement in computer graphics and interactive techniques. The award includes a prize of $2,000.

Current Recipient

ACM SIGGRAPH is pleased to present the 2026 Achievement Award to Alexei (Alyosha) Efros for pioneering work in data-driven and machine learning approaches to a wide range of visual content generation, computational photography, and image and video editing tasks.

Alyosha’s work has been pivotal in shifting the field of computer graphics from the manual modeling of shapes, surface materials, and manual animation to the creative reuse of real-world content and today’s focus on machine learning-based generative modeling. His early work on data-driven texture synthesis, scene completion, and photo clip art were seminal in establishing image re-combination as a fundamental primitive in computer generated imagery. His automated photo pop-up was among the first to demonstrate that single images could be used to create 3D scenes. Image-to-image translation, pix2pix, and CycleGAN nucleated the incredibly vibrant field of generative imagery, which has recently seen explosive growth, and where Alyosha and his collaborators continue to actively push the frontier. In addition to these contributions in image and 3D scene generation, Alyosha has been at the forefront of the explosion in visual understanding capabilities over the last two decades and today’s deep interplay between the fields of computer graphics and computer vision.

Alyosha received his Bachelor of Science in Computer Science from the University of Utah in 1997 and his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science from the University of California, Berkeley in 1999 and 2003. He was briefly a Visiting Research Fellow at the Oxford Robotics Research Group and then a faculty member at Carnegie Mellon University from 2004 to 2013. Since 2007, he was also a frequent visiting researcher at the WILLOW team at INRIA in Paris. In 2013, he returned to the University of California, Berkeley, where he is now the Howard Friesen Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences and is part of the Berkeley Artificial Intelligence Research (BAIR) Lab.

Throughout his professional career, Alyosha has actively contributed to the graphics and computer vision research communities as a senior member of program committees, Journal Editor, and workshop co-organizer. He has mentored more than three dozen Masters, Ph.D., and postdoctoral fellows, many of whom are now leading researchers in the computer graphics, computer vision, and AI communities.

Nomination Procedure

ACM SIGGRAPH members are encouraged to nominate individuals for the Computer Graphics Achievement Award by sending an email to the Technical Awards Chair (technical_awards@siggraph.org) by January 31 of each year.

Requirements

Your nomination should describe a candidate’s most significant research contribution(s), and optionally describe industrial impact, community service, and/or other contributions to computer graphics and interactive techniques. The Technical Awards Committee uses nomination statements as the main basis for their selections, so a concise and clear statement is strongly encouraged. Descriptions of a small number of contributions (one is acceptable) are preferable to a long list of activities.