Two VCL students receive top industry fellowships

Benedikt Bitterli and Zack Misso, both PhD students in the Dartmouth Visual Computing Lab supervised by Prof. Wojciech Jarosz, have been awarded industry fellowships from NVIDIA and Facebook. Both companies had to choose between hundreds of qualified applicants, making the selection process competitive.

Benedikt is one of 5 recipients of the NVIDIA Graduate Fellowship and the only one proposing computer graphics research this year! He is interested in principled forms of sample reuse that unlock more efficient ray-tracing techniques for offline and real-time rendering. Real-time raytracing requires clever use of the small budget of rays available per pixel, and reusing information learned from neighboring pixels or past frames provides an efficient way of informing better future samples. His research is focused on unbiased and low-noise methods of reuse that can improve samples without introducing artifacts.

The NVIDIA Graduate Fellowship Program provides funding in the amount of up to $50,000 per award to PhD students who are researching topics that will lead to major advances in the graphics and high-performance computing industries, and are investigating innovative ways of leveraging the power of the GPU.

Zack is part of the 2020 Facebook Emerging Scholar Program. His research interests lie in physically-based rendering as well as differential rendering where he is looking to expand the scope of realistic rendering methods to become useful tools for solving inverse problems. With most of his experience being in rendering volumetrics, such as clouds, he hopes to one day be able to reconstruct volumetrics perfectly from only a few photographs.

Winners of the Facebook Fellowship Program are entitled to receive two years of paid tuition and fees, a $42,000 annual stipend to cover living and conference travel costs, a paid visit to Facebook headquarters for the annual Fellowship Summit, and various opportunities to engage with Facebook researchers.

Congratulations to Benedikt and Zack!