Pfister honored with Visualization Technical Achievement Award

Hanspeter Pfister, Professor of the Practice of Computer Science and Director of Visual Computing at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS), was awarded the 2010 Visualization Technical Achievement Award on behalf of the IEEE.

The Committee was impressed by Pfister's seminal technical work in real-time volume rendering.

His hardware implementations of fundamental visualization techniques have enabled innovative hardware and and stimulated commercial applications of volume rendering and modeling. Volume rendering, the Committee noted, is certainly one of the most influential accomplishments of our field.

"Personally, I am excited because I saw [Hanspeter] mature from an enthusiastic graduate student with idealistic ideas about what could be implemented in hardware into a technology leader who formed a foundation for a commercial product," said Bill Lorensen, chair of the Chair of the IEEE Visualization Technical Awards Committee. "In addition, he continues to make many important technical and community contributions to our field. It is fulfilling to have a friend and colleague receive this recognition."

Pfister's research lies at the intersection of visualization,computer graphics, and computer vision. It spans a wide range of topics,including visualization, computational photography, point-based graphics, appearance modeling, 3D television, and face recognition.

He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science in 1996 from the State University of New York at Stony Brook and his M.S. in Electrical Engineering from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) Zurich,Switzerland, in 1991.

Prior to his appointment at Harvard, Pfister worked for 11 years at Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories (MERL) where he was most recently Associate Director and Senior Research Scientist. He was the chief architect of VolumePro, Mitsubishi Electric’s award-winning real-time volume rendering hardware for PCs.