On 14th August, Shunsuke Hirata (D1), Department of Electrical Engineering and Information Systems, received First Place in the ACM SIGGRAPH 2025 Student Research Competition (Graduate Division).
First Place in the ACM SIGGRAPH 2025 Student Research Competition (Graduate Division)
ACM SIGGRAPH is the most important international conference in computer graphics. The ACM Student Research Competition is a student research competition hosted by the ACM, an international learned society in computing. At the SIGGRAPH 2025 Posters Program (with 249 submissions, 77 accepted, and an acceptance rate of 31%), Mr. Hirata's work was selected and awarded as the most outstanding research among graduate students.
About awarded research
Mr. Hirata's awarded research is a method for designing free-form balancing toys. For a solid object to balance on a single point, its center of mass should be below the contact point. However, achieving this for any 3D model is challenging. Mr. Hirata proposed a technique that enables the design of balancing toys of any shape by optimizing the mass distribution and applying minimal deformation to change the object's center of mass.
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3721250.3743002
https://s2025.siggraph.org/event/student-research-competition/
Your impression & future plan
I am deeply honored to have received an award at SIGGRAPH, an international conference considered the pinnacle of computer graphics. I would like to express my sincere gratitude to Professor Yoshihiro Kawahara, Associate Professor Koya Narumi, Mr. Yuta Noma, and all the members of the Kawahara Lab for their guidance. I will use this experience as motivation to dedicate myself further to my research and contribute to society.