February 19, 2018
The Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) announced its 2018 Fellows on January 1, 2018. Among the 2018 cohort was Dinesh Manocha, Phi Delta Theta/Matthew Mason Distinguished Professor in the Department of Computer Science.
The AAAI Fellows program launched in 1990 to recognize individuals who have made “significant, sustained contributions—usually over at least a ten-year period—to the field of artificial intelligence.” The five to 10 Fellows selected each year are recognized as having unusual distinction in the profession.
Manocha leads the UNC Geometric Algorithms for Modeling, Motion, and Animation (GAMMA) group along with Ming Lin. GAMMA undertakes research in a variety of areas, including crowd simulation, sound synthesis, autonomous navigation and collision detection, haptic manipulation and artificial intelligence. The group has developed many well-known software packages, which have been licensed to industrial organizations including Intel, Microsoft, Disney, Ford, Kawasaki, Siemens, Electronic Arts, Phillips Labs, MSC Software, Lockheed Martin and Raytheon.
Manocha He has served as a program committee member for more than 100 leading conferences on virtual reality, computer graphics, computational geometry, geometric and solid modeling, animation and molecular modeling. Manocha has advised more than 70 master’s and doctoral students over 23 years with UNC Computer Science.
Manocha and the rest of the newly elected Fellows were honored at an event on February 4 in New Orleans.