Biographical Sketch
Michiel van de Panne's research interests are in deep reinforcement learning, physics-based models of human and animal movement,
motion planning and control, robotics, and applications of machine learning to computer graphics.
His group's research has won multiple best-paper awards.
He was awarded the 2016 Achievement Award
for his contributions to computer graphics, and held a Tier 2 Canada Research Chair during 2002-2011.
He currently serves as the deputy director of CAIDA, which is UBC's main AI organization.
In 2002 he co-founded the ACM/Eurographics Symposium
on Computer Animation, a leading forum for computer animation research.
He has served as Associate Editor of ACM Transactions on Graphics
(2005-2008, 2017-2020). He has co-chaired
EG CAS 1997,
SCA 2002,
Skigraph 2004,
GI 2005,
SBIM 2007, SCA 2011,
and PG 2019.
He has served on numerous program committees, including
ACM SIGGRAPH,
Eurographics,
ACM/EG SCA,
ACM I3D,
Graphics Interface,
NPAR, and
CASA.
His students and postdocs have (co)founded companies including Anomotion, VGC Software, Element AI, and Waverly;
have assumed leading roles at Tesla (director of AI and Autopilot vision) and DeepMotion,
and nine are faculty at ETH Zurich, Simon Fraser University (x2), Université de Montreal, CNRS/Ecole-Polytechnique, University of Utah, Peking University, York University, and Leeds University.
The work he did with his M.Sc. student Ivan Neulander helped form
the basis of the Rhythm & Hues hair rendering pipeline for
The Chronicles of Narnia and other films.
Michiel van de Panne obtained his B.A.Sc. in 1987 (
University of Calgary),
and his M.A.Sc. & Ph.D. in 1989 and 1994, respectively
(University of Toronto).
From 1993 to 2001 he was a faculty member in
the Department of Computer Science
at the University of Toronto. Since 2002 he has been
with the Department of Computer
Science at the University of British Columbia
as Associate Professor (2002-2008) and as Full Professor (2008-).
He served as Associate Head for Research and Faculty Affairs during 2011-14.
During 2000-2001, he was a visiting professor at the University of British Columbia,
and founded Motion Playground Inc. to develop games and educational applications
using physics-based animation and simulation. He was a visting Researcher at INRIA Sophia Antipolis
during 2007-8.
Awards and more (full credit goes to my students)
- 2022 ACM SIGGRAPH Computer Graphics Achievement Award
- Highlighted Reviewer, ICLR 2022 (International Conference on Learning Represtations)
- Best Paper, SCA 2020 (ACM SIGGRAPH/EG Symposium on Computer Animation)
- 2019 Faculty Teaching Award, UBC Department of Computer Science
- 2019 IEEE SciVis Test-of-time Award; for the 2004 IEEE Vis paper: Simplifying Flexible Isosurfaces Using Local Geometric Measures
- Best Paper, MIG 2018 (Motion, Interaction, and Games)
- Best Reviewer, ICLR 2018 (International Conference on Learning Representations)
- Governor General's Gold Medal: Jason Peng, M.Sc. thesis, 2018 (supervisor)
- Best Student Paper, SCA 2017 (ACM SIGGRAPH/EG Symposium on Computer Animation)
- Best Canadian Computer Graphics Dissertation: Boris Dalstein, 2017 Alain Fournier Award
- Best Poster, Graphics Interface 2016
- 2016 Achievement Award for contributions to computer graphics
- Best Paper, SCA 2015 (ACM SIGGRAPH/EG Symposium on Computer Animation)
- Best Paper honorable mention, SCA 2013 (ACM SIGGRAPH/EG Symposium on Computer Animation)
- Best Paper, MIG 2013 (Motion in Games)
- Best Canadian Computer Graphics Dissertation: Stelian Coros, 2010 Alain Fournier Award
- Canada Research Chair, Tier 2, 2002-2012
- Best Paper, Computers and Graphics, 2001
- CSSU Award for Teaching Excellence, 1997, University of Toronto