Derek Nowrouzezahrai
About
Appointed Canada CIFAR AI Chair – 2024
Derek Nowrouzezahrai is a Full Professor at McGill University and the Quebec Institute for Artificial Intelligence (Mila), where he Directs the McGill Graphics Lab and the Centre for Intelligent Machines. Derek’s group works on devising new mathematical models of visual phenomena and dynamics, developing efficient and differentiable numerical approaches to solve forward and inverse problems in complex physics-based regimes. These include problems in light transport, fluid dynamics and control, reinforcement and representation learning, robotics, augmented reality, digital manufacturing, computational optics and imaging, and image and geometry processing. His work has been adopted in feature films, video games, autonomous vehicles, amusement parks and consumer products.
Awards
- Mila-Ubisoft Research Chair in Scaling Game Worlds with Responsible AI
- Industrial Research Chair in Believable Virtual Character Experiences, NSERC/Ubisoft (2017-2023)
- Tier II Canada Research Chair in Realistic Image Synthesis, NSERC (2015 – 2016)
- Outstanding Young Computer Science Researcher Prize, Canadian Association of Computer Science (2014)
Relevant Publications
- MeshDiffusion: Score-based Generative 3D Mesh Modeling. Liu, Z.; Feng, Y.; Black, M. J.; Nowrouzezahrai, D.; Paull, L.; and Liu, W. CoRR, abs/2303.08133. 2023.
- Efficient Differentiation of Pixel Reconstruction Filters for Path-Space Differentiable Rendering. Yu, Z.; Zhang, C.; Nowrouzezahrai, D.; Dong, Z.; and Zhao, S. ACM Trans. Graph., 41(6): 191:1–191:16. 2022.
- Kubric: A scalable dataset generator. Greff, K.; Belletti, F.; Beyer, L.; Doersch, C.; Du, Y.; Duckworth, D.; Fleet, D. J.; Gnanapragasam, D.; Golemo, F.; Herrmann, C.; Kipf, T.; Kundu, A.; Lagun, D.; Laradji, I.H.; Liu, H. D.; Meyer, H.; Miao, Y.; Nowrouzezahrai, D.; Öztireli, A. C.; Pot, E.; Radwan, N.; Rebain, D.; Sabour, S.; Sajjadi, M. S. M.; Sela, M.; Sitzmann, V.; Stone, A.; Sun, D.; Vora, S.; Wang, Z.; Wu, T.; Yi, K. M.; Zhong, F.; and Tagliasacchi, A. In IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, CVPR 2022, New Orleans, LA, USA, June 18-24, 2022, pages 3739–3751, 2022. IEEE
- Differentiable Compound Optics and Processing Pipeline Optimization for End-to-end Camera Design.Tseng, E.; Mosleh, A.; Mannan, F.; Arnaud, K. S.; Sharma, A.; Peng, Y.; Braun, A.; Nowrouzezahrai, D.; Lalonde, J.; and Heide, F. ACM Trans. Graph., 40(2): 18:1–18:19. 2021.
- Neural Geometric Level of Detail: Real-Time Rendering With Implicit 3D Shapes. Takikawa, T.; Litalien, J.; Yin, K.; Kreis, K.; Loop, C. T.; Nowrouzezahrai, D.; Jacobson, A.; McGuire, M.; and Fidler, S. In IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, CVPR 2021, virtual, June 19-25, 2021, pages 11358–11367, 2021. Computer Vision Foundation / IEEE