Hanspeter Pfister received his master's degree in 1991 in electrical engineering atETH Zurich and moved to the United States for his PhD in computer science atStony Brook University. In 1992 he began working withArie Kaufman on Cube-3, a hardware architecture forvolume visualization. By the time of his graduation in 1996, he had finished the architecture for Cube-4 and licensed it toMitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories.[2] He joinedMitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories in 1996 as a research scientists, where he worked for over a decade.[3] He was the chief architect of VolumePro, Mitsubishi Electric's real-time volume rendering graphics card, for which he received the Mitsubishi Electric President's Award in 2000.[4] He joined the faculty atHarvard University in 2007. In 2012 Hanspeter Pfister was appointed the An Wang Professor of Computer Science and started his research lab called the Visual Computing Group. In the same year, he also served as the Technical Papers Chair atSIGGRAPH[5] and became a consultant forDisney Research[6] From 2013 to 2017, Hanspeter Pfister was the director of the Institute for Applied Computational Science at theHarvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences.
2019, Elected into theIEEE Visualization Academy as a recognition for his achievements in the scientific visualization and information visualization research communities.[9]
2011, Dean's Thesis Prize, Harvard Extension School ALM in Information Technology, for Michael Tracey Zellman's thesis “Creating and Visualizing Congressional Districts”
2009, Petra T. Shattuck Excellence in Teaching Award.
2009, Dean's Thesis Prize, Harvard Extension School ALM in Information Technology, for Manish Kumar's thesis “View-Dependent FTLV”
2007, Dean's Thesis Prize, Harvard Extension School ALM in Information Technology, for Joseph Weber's thesis “ProteinShader: Cartoon-Type Visualization of Macromolecules Using Programmable Graphics Cards”
2005, Dean's Thesis Prize, Harvard Extension School ALM in Information Technology, for George P. Stathis’ thesis “Aspect-Oriented Shade Trees”
2002, 2003, and 2004, Distinguished Teaching Performance, Harvard Extension School
2000, Mitsubishi Electric President's Award.
1999, Innovation Awards and Top 100 Products Award for VolumePro
1994, The Jack Heller Award for Outstanding Contribution to the CS Department, SUNY Stony Brook
1992, Swiss Academy of Technical Sciences Fellowship
1991 and 1992, ABB Switzerland Research Fellowship
As of Dec 2019, according to Google Scholar,[12] Hanspeter Pfister's most cited publications are:
Pfister, H., Zwicker, M., Van Baar, J., & Gross, M. (2000). Surfels: Surface elements as rendering primitives. InProceedings of the 27th annual conference on Computer graphics and interactive techniques, 335–342.
Zwicker, M., Pfister, H., Van Baar, J., & Gross, M. (2001). Surface splatting. InProceedings of the 28th annual conference on Computer graphics and interactive techniques, 371–378.
Marks, J., Andalman, B., Beardsley, P. A., Freeman, W., Gibson, S., Hodgins, J., Kang, T., Mirtich, B., Pfister, H., Ruml, W., et al. (1997). Design galleries: A general approach to setting parameters for computer graphics and animation. InProceedings of the 24th annual conference on Computer graphics and interactive techniques, 389–400.
Matusik, W., & Pfister, H. (2004). 3D TV: a scalable system for real-time acquisition, transmission, and autostereoscopic display of dynamic scenes. InACM Transactions on Graphics (TOG), 23, 3, 814–824.
Vlasic, D., Brand, M., Pfister, H., & Popović, J. (2005). Face transfer with multilinear models. InACM transactions on graphics (TOG), 24, 3, 426–433.
Pfister, H., Hardenbergh, J., Knittel, J., Lauer, H., and Seiler, L. (1999). The VolumePro real-time ray-casting system. InProceedings of the 26th Annual Conference on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques, SIGGRAPH 99, 251–260.
Kasthuri, N., Hayworth, K. J., Berger, D. R., Schalek, R. L., Conchello, J. e. A., Knowles-Barley, S., Lee, D., Vãzquez Reina, A., Kaynig, V., Jones, T. R., et al. (2015). Saturated reconstruction of a volume of neocortex.Cell, 162(3):648–661.
Lex, A., Gehlenborg, N., Strobelt, H., Vuillemot, R., & Pfister, H. (2014). UpSet: visualization of intersecting sets.IEEE transactions on visualization and computer graphics, 20(12), 1983–1992.
Pfister, H., Lorensen, B., Bajaj, C., Kindlmann, G., Schroeder, W., Avila, L. S., Raghu, K. M., Machiraju, R. & Lee, J. (2001). The transfer function bake-off.IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications, 21(3), 16–22.
Borkin, M. A., Vo, A. A., Bylinskii, Z., Isola, P., Sunkavalli, S., Oliva, A., & Pfister, H. (2013). What makes a visualization memorable?.IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, 19(12), 2306–2315.
A complete list of Hanspeter Pfister's publications can be found on his research group's website.[13]
