I won the 2017 Alain Fournier Award!!

March 29, 2018

Hi everyone!

I have great news to share: I am the recipient of the 2017 Alain Fournier Award for best Canadian Computer Graphics Dissertation!!

Full info here: http://graphicsinterface.org/awards/alain-fournier/boris-dalstein/

My PhD dissertation lays down the theoretical foundations behind the technology implemented in VPaint, and soon to be implemented in VGC Illustration and VGC Animation. If you are interested, the whole dissertation is freely available here under a Creative Commons license. The research chapters are very technical, but you might enjoy the introduction (Chapter 1), and the brief history of vector graphics (Chapter 2, Section 2.1).

Here is a quote from the award citation that nicely summarizes my work:

« Vector graphics is a core technology at the heart of many well-established drawing tools and other software. While vector graphics geometry can be edited with relative ease, the support for topological changes has been very limited so far. Dalstein’s beautifully illustrated dissertation raises the community’s attention to this important problem and presents insightful solutions built on top of mathematically rigorous foundations. »

This award is a great opportunity to get more exposure to this project! In fact, I am invited to give a distinguished presentation of my dissertation in Toronto on May 8-11, during Graphics Interface 2018, where I will be given the award. Graphics Interface is the longest running conference in the field of Computer Graphics: it started in 1969, before even SIGGRAPH existed! In order to give some perspective, Pixar's co-founder Ed Catmull was one of the invited speaker back in 1981 :)

Once again, thank you for your support! This post is public, so feel free to share the news to your social circles :)

Cheers!

Boris