Tom Cashman wins Eurographics dissertation award

Eurographics, the European Association for Computer Graphics, has chosen Tom Cashman 2010 dissertation as one of this year's three award winners. Tom's dissertation, "NURBS-compatible subdivision surfaces", had previously been the runner-up in the 2010 BCS Distinguished Dissertation competition.

The citation for the award reads:

Tom Cashman’s PhD dissertation contains a fundamental breakthrough in unifying NURBS and subdivision, something that many had come to believe impossible. He presents new results on the construction and analysis of subdivision surfaces of arbitrary topology, arbitrary degree, and arbitrary knot spacing of the underlying space of B-splines. His work overcomes the limitations of known approaches and thus perfects the theory of subdivision surfaces in a beautiful and convincing way. The dissertation is a major contribution towards a comprehensive understanding of subdivision as a versatile tool for representing freeform surfaces in computer graphics and scientific computing. The exposition of the material is of the highest standard: the dissertation is elegantly written and beautifully presented. The dissertation was the runner-up in the British Computer Society’s 2010 Distinguished Dissertation Competition.

Tom was supervised by Dr Malcolm Sabin and Prof. Neil Dodgson. He is currently working as a post-doc in Kai Hormann's group at the Università della Svizzera Italiana in Lugano, Switzerland.