Image credit: Headshots courtesy of Kavita Bala, Hui Huang, Sylvain Paris
In this episode of SIGGRAPH Spotlight, SIGGRAPH 2025 Technical Papers Test-of-Time Awards Chair Sylvain Paris catches up with two of this year’s Test-of-Time award winners: Kavita Bala (“Learning Visual Similarity for Product Design With Convolutional Neural Networks”, 2015) and Hui Huang (“L1-Medial Skeleton of Point Cloud”, 2013). The guests share why they think their research has withstood the test of time, insights into advancements in 3D graphics, and advice for other researchers who aspire to make lasting contributions to the body of computer graphics knowledge.
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About Our Guests
Kavita Bala is the 17th Provost of Cornell University. She received her S.M. and Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and her B.Tech. from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT, Bombay). She co-founded GrokStyle, a visual recognition AI company, which drew IKEA as a client, and was acquired by Facebook in 2019. Before becoming Provost, Bala was the inaugural Dean of the Cornell Ann S. Bowers College of Computing and Information Science, and before that, she served as the Chair of the Cornell Computer Science Department.
Bala specializes in computer graphics and computer vision, leading research in visual recognition and search; material modeling and acquisition; physically based rendering; and material perception. Her work on 3D Mandalas was featured at the Rubin Museum of Art, New York. Bala is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences (2025), an ACM Fellow (2019), the recipient of the SIGGRAPH Computer Graphics Achievement Award (2020), and was inducted into the SIGGRAPH Academy in 2020. Bala has served on SIGGRAPH’s Papers Advisory Group (PAG), as the Editor-in-Chief of Transactions on Graphics (TOG), and several times on the Papers Advisory Boards for SIGGRAPH and SIGGRAPH Asia.
Hui Huang is a Chair Professor at Shenzhen University, serving as Dean of CS and Director of the Visual Computing Research Center. She received her Ph.D. in Applied Math from the University of British Columbia in 2008 and another Ph.D. in Computational Math from Wuhan University in 2006. Her current research spans spatial acquisition, geometry modeling, shape analysis, and scene understanding, seamlessly integrating computer graphics and 3D vision. A prolific scholar, she has published 60+ papers in ACM TOG/SIGGRAPH at an outstanding rate and holds 40+ US and 150+ Chinese patents, with many commercialized for substantial industrial impact.
Sylvain Paris is a Fellow and a Lab Director at Adobe Research. His personal research interests are about photo editing and related topics. His team covers various aspects of machine learning, computer graphics, computer vision, cognitive science, programming languages, and audio. Several of their research contributions have become popular features in products like Photoshop, Lightroom, and Premiere. Sylvain served several times on the program committee of conferences like SIGGRAPH, Eurographics, and CVPR, and on the editorial boards of journals like Transactions on Graphics and Transactions on Computational Imaging. In 2021, he chaired the Technical Papers program of SIGGRAPH. Before joining Adobe in 2007, he worked with François Sillion at INRIA to prepare his PhD that he received from Université Joseph Fourier in Grenoble in 2004, and he then did a post-doc at MIT with Frédo Durand.
