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<p style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The 2015 Visualization Career Award goes to <b>Markus Gross</b> in recognition of sustained seminal research advances in visualization, displays, computer graphics, and computer vision and the resulting establishment of multiple companies and software packages. </p><p style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Markus Gross is a full professor of Computer Science at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zurich, head of the Computer Graphics Laboratory at ETH, a Vice President of Disney Research and the director of Disney Research in Zurich.</p><p style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Verdana, sans-serif;">Gross started his career in visualization. His early work includes the use of wavelets for surface representations and progressive simplification in scientific visualization. Later, he pioneered point-based visualization and graphics. His research contributed significantly to the understanding of points as primitives for the representation and display of 3-dimensional geometry as well as of scientific datasets. He also developed the world’s first hardware architecture for efficient point rendering. In addition, Gross and his students have created numerous algorithms for the simulation and visualization of physical phenomena, such as deformations, fracture and fluids. These methods are utilized in medical as well as in entertainment applications around the world. A further scientific contribution of Gross was the design of blue-c, an immersive projection and 3D video capture system for collaborative visualization and immersive telepresence. This research was also extended to 3-dimensional video processing and free-viewpoint video, a technology he pioneered. A less well known, but very impactful project exploits multimodal information visualization for training of children with dyslexia, a method used by tens of thousands of children in Swiss elementary schools. Gross’ current research interests are focused onto entertainment technology including film production and postproduction, human faces, digital fabrication, and storytelling.</span></p><p style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Verdana, sans-serif;">Gross’ strong commitment to mentorship is reflected by 44 Ph.D. students he has supervised and graduated. Many of them hold leading positions in academia or industry. Gross also maintains a strong commitment to excellence in teaching and continues to develop new undergraduate and graduate classes in Computer Science at ETH.</span></p><p style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Verdana, sans-serif;">Besides his academic achievements Gross’ entrepreneurial spirit led to five startup companies, co-founded with his students and collaborators over the years.</span> </p><p style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">------------</p><p style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.8px;">The IEEE VGTC Visualization Technical Achievement Award was established in 2004. It is given every year to recognize an individual for a seminal technical achievement in visualization. VGTC members may nominate individuals for the Visualization Technical Achievement Award by contacting the awards chair, Larry Rosenblum, at vgtc-vis-awards@</span><a href="http://vgtc.org/" target="_blank" style="color: rgb(17, 85, 204); font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.8px;"> vgtc.org</a><span style="font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.8px;">. For the past awardee, please visit </span><font face="arial, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: 12.8px;">http://vgtc.org/content/visualization-technical-awards.</span></font></p><p style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> </p><p style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Best regards,</p><p style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">- Jian (on behalf of VIS 2015 publicity chairs)</p><p style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: small;">----------------------------------------------------------</span></p><div style="color: rgb(34, 34, 34); font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: small;">Jian Chen, PhD, Assistant Prof. </div><div style="color: rgb(34, 34, 34); font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: small;">CSEE, University of Maryland Baltimore County</div><div style="color: rgb(34, 34, 34); font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: small;"><a href="http://www.csee.umbc.edu/~jichen" target="_blank" style="color: rgb(17, 85, 204);">http://www.csee.umbc.edu/~jichen</a></div><p style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> </p><div> </div><BR><hr />Message sent via Atmail Open - http://atmail.org/</HTML>