University of Toronto Professor Aaron Hertzmann is winner of the 2010 Steacie Prize for natural science, becoming only the award’s second Computer Science profession to win it since it’s inception in 1964. Primarily for his work in computer vision and machine learning, he’s been involved with several nonphotorealistic rendering technologies currently under investigation by groups like Pixar.
Hertzmann is well-known in the field for his influential work linking three separate research areas within computer science – computer graphics, machine learning and computer vision. By focusing on the application of machine-learning techniques and Bayesian methods, he has resolved a wide range of computer graphics problems. These include computer rendering of images in diverse artistic styles (an area known as non-photorealistic rendering); automated construction of mathematical and computational models of human locomotion for computer animation in film and computer games; estimating the three-dimensional structure of a non-rigid object from a video sequence of that object; and finding new methods for removing the effects of “camera shake” from photographs in digital photography.
