Baining Guo, the 2026 SMA Pioneer Award Recipient
- Personal Website: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/people/bainguo/
Baining Guo’s Research Contributions
Baining Guo has worked on geometric modeling for over 35 years, most of the time as a research scientist at Microsoft Research Asia. He has contributed to the field in many ways. Here we mention his key contributions in implicit Bézier surfaces, mesh geometry processing, texture mapping, and neural geometry processing:
Implicit Bézier Surfaces and Free-form Solids
His early research focused on implicit Bézier surfaces. He also developed CSG and B-Rep constructions of free-form surfaces using implicit Bézier patches. This work enabled highly efficient processing of free-form surfaces on the Cornell RayCasting Engine (RCE).
Mesh Geometry Processing
In the 2000s, he switched to mesh geometry processing. Major topics included Poisson mesh editing and deformation, and GPU-accelerated geometry data structures such as KD-trees and octrees. Much of this research was groundbreaking. It resulted in influential publications at SIGGRAPH and other major venues, as well as technologies widely used in industry.
Mesh Parameterization and Texture Mapping
He also made key contributions to mesh parameterization for texture mapping. His iso-charts paper (SGP ’04) provides the core technology for the Microsoft UVAtlas SDK. UVAtlas has become the de facto industry standard tool for texture mapping. It has been widely used by PC and Xbox game developers.
Neural Geometry Processing
More recently, he has been working on neural geometry processing using hierarchical vision transformers.
Service to the Community
Baining Guo has served on the program committees of major conferences in geometric modeling, including Solid and Physical Modeling (SPM) and Geometric Modeling and Processing (GMP). He was on the editorial boards of IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications, and Computers & Graphics. He was a keynote speaker at Solid and Physical Modeling (SPM), Shape Modeling International (SMI), and Geometric Modeling and Processing (GMP).