Dinesh Manocha

Biography

Dinesh Manocha is currently the Paul Chrisman Iribe Chair of Computer Science and Electrical & Computer Engineering and Distinguished University Professor 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 has published more than 850 papers in the leading conferences and journals in computer graphics, robotics, computational geometry, databases, multimedia, high performance computing and symbolic computation, and received 22 best paper and test of time awards. He has also served as program committee member or program chair of more than 120 leading conferences and given more than 175 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 19 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, Amazon Research Awards, Facebook/Meta Distinguished Faculty Awards, Google Research Awards, Northrop Grumman Faculty Research Award, Verisk AI Faculty Research, etc. He is a Fellow of ACM, AAAS, AAAI, IEEE, NAI, member of ACM SIGGRAPH Academy and IEEE VR Academy, and recipient of Bézier Award from Solid Modeling Association and Jimmy Lin Award for Innovation and Invention at the University of Maryland. He received the Distinguished Alumni Award from Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi and the Distinguished Career in Computer Science Award from Washington Academy of Sciences.

Manocha has supervised more than 63 Ph.D. dissertations and is currently supervising 25+ PhD 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 500,000 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, Amazon, ARA, Boeing, Disney, Dolby, Google, Lockheed, Intel, Microsoft, NVIDIA, Oculus, SAIC, Willow Garage, Samsung, etc. Manocha’s research has been supported by ARO, ARL, 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 120 grants with $90M funding. He is a co-founder of three companies, including Impulsonic that developed physics-based audio simulation technologies and was acquired by Valve Inc in November 2016. The Phonon technology developed by UNC/Impulsonic has been widely released as Steam Audio SDK.