Dinesh Manocha

Dinesh Manocha is currently the Paul Chrisman Iribe Chair of Computer Science and Electrical & Computer Engineering at the University of Maryland at College Park. Earlier he was the Matthew Mason/Phi Delta Theta Distinguished Professor of Computer Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He co-leads a major research group with more than 20 members on geometric and simulation algorithms with applications to computer graphics, robotics and virtual environments. He has published more than 500 papers in the leading conferences and journals in computer graphics, robotics, computational geometry, databases, multimedia, high performance computing and symbolic computation, and received 16 best paper and time of test awards. He has also served as program committee member or program chair of more than 120 leading conferences in these areas. Moreover, he has given more than 110 invited or keynote talks at conferences and distinguished lectures at other institutions. Manocha has served as a member of the editorial board or guest editor of eleven leading journals in computer graphics, robotics, geometry processing and scientific computing. He is a co-inventor of 9 patents, several of which have been licensed to industry. He has won many awards including NSF Career Award, ONR Young Investigator Award, Sloan Fellowship, IBM Fellowship, SIGMOD IndySort Winner, Honda Research Award, UNC Hettleman Prize, etc. He is a Fellow of ACM, AAAS, AAAI, and IEEE, and received Distinguished Alumni Award from Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi.

Manocha has supervised 40 Ph.D. students. His research group has developed many well-known software packages for collision detection, triangulation, GPU-based algorithms, multi-agent simulation, texture compression, solid modeling, solving algebraic systems, etc. These packages have been downloaded by more than 200,000 users worldwide and licensed to more than 60 industrial organizations including Intel, Microsoft, Disney, Ford, Kawasaki, Siemens, Phillips Labs, MSC Software, Lockheed Martin, Raytheon etc. His group has actively collaborated with many industrial organizations including AMD/ATI, ARA, Boeing, Disney, Dolby, Google, Lockheed, Intel, Microsoft, NVIDIA, Oculus, SAIC, Willow Garage, Samsung, etc. Manocha’s research has been supported by ARO, Boeing, DARPA, IARPA, NASA, NIH, NRL, NSF, ONR, RDECOM, and many industrial partners; he has served as a Principal Investigator or Co-Principal Investigator on more than 70 grants. He was a co-founder of Impulsonic, a developer of physics-based audio simulation technologies, which was acquired by Valve Inc in November 2016. The Phonon technology developed by UNC/Impulsonic has been widely released as Steam Audio SDK.