Main research goal : developing User-centered, Creative 3D Modeling & Animation.
My goal is to advance towards intelligent systems that help users express the shapes in motion they have in mind, and their organization intro complex virtual worlds. These users may be computer artists, but also the general public, engineers or scientists from other disciplines who have mental images of their objects of study, but cannot seamlessly communicate them. Our general methodology is to provide them expressive, gesture-based control (such as sketching, deformation, copy-pasting) while augmenting the graphical models they manipulate with knowledge, was it laws from priors or statistics and correlations learnt from examples.
Keywords: Smart 3D graphics, Implicit surfaces, Developable surfaces, Procedural models, Physically-based animation, Expressive modeling and animation, Sculpting, Deformation, Sketch-based modelling.
Main recent projects:
2012-2017: ERC Advanced Grant EXPRESSIVE: EXPloring RESponsive Shapes for the creation of Interactive Virtual Environnements.
2016-2019: creation and scientific lead of the STREAM Team, LIX, Ecole Polytechnique: STructure Representation and Extraction for computer Animation and geometric Modeling.
2018-2021: Principal investigator in the chair between Google and Ecole Polytechnique, on Artificial Intelligence & Visual Computing.
2020-2024: International Training Network CLIPE (Creating Lively Interactive Populated Environments), funded by the European Research council (Horizon 2020).
2021-2024: Advanced fellowship Creative AI (CREating and Animating Testbesd of Ideas, through Virtual Environments with Artificial Intelligence) from the institute Hi!Paris, IP Paris.
2023-2026: Interdisciplinary project Paleomob-3D (Simulation 3D de la mobilité paléolithique) between LIX and HNHP, funded by CNRS 80-Prime.
Short Bio
Marie-Paule Cani is a Professor of Computer Science at Ecole Polytechnique. Her research interests cover both Shape Modelling and Computer Animation. She contributed over the years to a number of high level models for shapes and motion such as implicit surfaces, multi-resolution physically-based animation methods and hybrid representations for real-time natural scenes. Following a long lasting interest for virtual sculpture, she has been recently searching for more expressive ways to create 3D contents such as combining sketch-based interfaces with procedural models based on a priori knowledge or learning. She received the Eurographics outstanding technical contributions award in 2011, a Silver medal from CNRS in 2012, and was elected at the Academia Europaea in 2013. She was awarded the ERC advanced grant EXPRESSIVE (2012-2017) and joined the ACM Siggraph Academy in 2019. She was elected at the French Academy of Sciences in 2020.
Marie-Paule Cani was the Technical Paper Chair of ACM SIGGRAPH 2017, and program co-chair of Motion, Interaction and Games (MIG) in 2019. Before that, she served in the program committees of all major conferences in computer graphics and was program chair a number of times. She served in the steering committees of SCA, SBIM and SMI, and in the editorial board of ACM Transactions of Graphics (TOG), Computer Graphics Forum, IEEE TVCG and Graphical Models. She is now associate editor of Computers and Graphics. She was Director at Large in the EC of ACM SIGGRAPH from 2007 to 2011, and member of the ACM Publication Board from 2011 to 2014. In France, she served in the executive board of the GDR IG-RV (Informatique Géométrique et Graphique, Réalité Virtuelle et Visualisation) of CNRS and in the CA of the French chapter of Eurographics for many years. After being vice president from 2013, she was President of the Eurographics association in 2017 and 2018.
Diploma
1987 M.Sc. Computer Science, Ecole Normale Supérieure & University Paris XI, France.
1990 Ph.D. Computer Graphics, University Paris XI, France (advisor: Claude Puech).
1995 Habilitation Computer Science, Institut National Polytechnique de Grenoble.
Appointment held
Since May 2017: Professor, Ecole Polytechnique, Paris-Saclay, France
2014-2015 : Informatics and Computational Sciences chair at Collège de France
Since 1997 : Professor Grenoble INP
1993-1997 : Assistant Professor, Institut National Polytechnique de Grenoble
1990-1993 : Lecturer, and Assistant Prof. since 1991, Ecole Normale Supérieure (ENS), Paris.
Awards
2023 : ACM Siggraph Steven A. Coons Award.
2019 : Member of the ACM Siggraph Academy.
2013 : Member of Academia Europaea.
2012 : Silver medal from CNRS (Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique).
2011 : EUROGRAPHICS award for Outstanding Technical Contributions.
2007 : Irène Joliot Curie national award, mentorship category.
1999 : Junior member of the Institut Universitaire de France.
Local scientific leadership
Leader of the pole “Modeling Simulation and Learning” of the LIX (Computer Science lab, Ecole Polytechnique & CNRS), from october 2019 to 2023.
Creation in 2016 and scientific lead from 2017 to 2019 of the STREAM team of LIX.
Creation and scientific lead of Imagine, joint team Inria / LJK lab (Grenoble, France), from 2011 to march 2016.
Creation and scientific lead of Evasion, joint team Inria / GRAVIR lab (Grenoble, France), 2003-2010.
Co-director of GRAVIR (~200 researchers), CNRS, Inria, UJF and Grenoble-INP, 2003-2007.
Service to the community
Program co-chair of ACM MIG (Motion Interaction and Games) in 2019.
President of Eurographics in 2017 and 2018, after serving as vice-chair from 2013 to 2016.
Technical paper chair of ACM SIGGRAPH 2017, the main Computer Graphics conference.
Member of the ACM Publication Board 2011-2014.
Director at large, Executive Committee of ACM SIGGRAPH, 2008-2011.
Steering committees of SBIM since 2007, SMI since 2006, and SCA 2002_2009.
Editorial board of Computer & Graphics from 2018 (Past editorial boards: ACM Transactions on Graphics 2013-2017), Computer Graphics Forum 2009-2012, IEEE Transactions on Visualization & Computer Graphics 2005-2008, Graphical Model 2000-2005).
Chairing international conferences: Technical Paper chair of SIGGRAPH 2017. EXPRESSIVE‘2012 (joint symposia SBIM, NPAR, CAe), EG STAR 2012, SIGGRAPH-Asia 2010 (technical sketches & posters), Sketch-Based Interfaces & Modeling SBIM‘2008 (papers), ACM-EG Symposium on Computer Animation SCA‘2006 (papers), IEEE Shape Modeling International SMI‘2005, EUROGRAPHICS 2004 (papers), EG Computer Animation & Simulation 2001, Implicit Surfaces 95.
