ACM Dissertation Honorable Mention awarded to Pratul Srinivasan and Ben Mildenhall

The ACM Dissertation Honorable Mention has been awarded to Pratul Srinivasan and Ben Mildenhall for their work on Neural Radiance Fields (NeRFs). Srinivasan is the last of UC San Diego Computer Science & Engineering professor Ravi Ramamoorthi's graduate students to graduate from UC Berkeley. Professor Ramamoorthi moved from UC Berkeley to UC San Diego in 2014. At UC San Diego, Ramamoorthi Directs the UC San Diego Center for Visual Computing.

Pratul Srinivasan and Benjamin Mildenhall were jointly awarded an Honorable Mention for their co-invention of the Neural Radiance Field (NeRF) representation, associated algorithms and theory, and their successful application to the view synthesis problem.

From the ACM citation: Srinivasan’s dissertation, "Scene Representations for View Synthesis with Deep Learning," and Mildenhall’s dissertation, “Neural Scene Representations for View Synthesis,” addressed a long-standing open problem in computer vision and computer graphics. That problem, called “view synthesis” in vision and “unstructured light field rendering” in graphics, involves taking just a handful of photographs of a scene and predicting new images from any intermediate viewpoint.

NeRF has already inspired a remarkable volume of follow-on research, and the associated publications have received some of the fastest rates of citation in computer graphics literature—hundreds in the first year of post-publication.