Nicholas M. PatrikalakisNicholas M. Patrikalakis, the 2016 Pierre Bézier Award Recipient
The Bézier award committee has chosen to award the 2016 Bézier Award to Nicholas M. Patrikalakis to recognize his major contributions to the advancement of the solid and geometric modeling field for the last 25 years, for devising new robust computational geometry solutions for the design, analysis and fabrication of complex structures bounded by sculptured surfaces, and for shaping an inspiring new branch of research which has been and is strongly influential.
Nicholas Patrikalakis has made essential contributions in the area of shape processing and interrogation, recasting many related problems as solutions of nonlinear polynomial systems. He introduced a robust and efficient computational method for finding all roots of a system of nonlinear polynomial equations that operates in rounded interval arithmetic. He has succesfully solved important problems in engineering disciplines including physical modeling based on numerical simulation and physical experimentation, geometric and solid modeling, computer-aided design and manufacturing as well as computer visualization and more recently robotic path planning under uncertainty with applications in adaptive sampling, shape sensing and reconstruction.
Dr. Patrikalakis has received research funding from government agencies (such as the National Science Foundation, Office of Naval Research, Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and Naval Sea Systems Command of the US Navy in the United States and from the National Research Foundation – NRF – in Singapore) as well as from industry including General Electric, Westinghouse, Chevron, and Conoco in the US and Furukawa, Kawasaki and Toshiba in Japan. He has served as consultant to various industries including Chevron, Conoco, Furukawa, Mitsui, as well as to legal firm Kirkland & Ellis on intellectual property issues.
For his work in solid, geometric and physical modeling, Dr. Patrikalakis was appointed as the Kawasaki Professor of Engineering at MIT since October 1996.