Dinesh ManochaDinesh Manocha, the 2019 SMA Pioneer Award Recipient
- Personal Website: https://www.cs.umd.edu/people/dmanocha
Dinesh Manocha has contributed many fundamental results in geometric computing and physically-based modeling. His earlier work on the use of symbolic methods and his development of algebraic-numeric methods for intersection problems are regarded as textbook materials. He also developed efficient and accurate methods for the boundary evaluation of curved surfaces. Manocha proposed many new algorithms and software systems for collision and proximity queries, which have become state of the art solutions used by other researchers and commercial vendors. He developed good approximate methods for many challenging and high-dimensional geometric problems including swept volumes, medial axis evaluation, Minkowski sums, and configuration-spaces. He was among the first set of researchers that exploited the parallelization of GPUs for geometric problems and wrote the very first paper on using GPUs to compute Voronoi diagrams in 1999. Manocha has also worked on many application areas, including interactive rendering of massive CAD models, interactive simulation of rigid and deformable models, motion planning of high-dimensional robots, and multi-agent collision-free navigation. He has supervised 35 PhD students and many of his students are leading researchers in the area or hold senior positions in industry. Manocha was the program co-chair of ACM SPM in 2007 and 2008 and also won the best paper award at ACM SPM in 2003. He has also served on the editorial board of leading journals in geometric computing, graphical models, and computer graphics. Manocha has published more than 500 papers and his work is well-cited.