I’m recruiting interns for 2025 at Adobe Research Toronto. Please reach out to me at alecjacobson@adobe.com if you’re interested and have authorization to work in Canada.

Alec Jacobson

Associate Professor of Computer Science
Associate Professor of Mathematics (courtesy appointment)
Canada Research Chair in Geometry Processing

Dynamic Graphics Project
Department of Computer Science
Department of Mathematics
University of Toronto

Faculty Affiliate, Vector Institute

Senior Research Scientist, Adobe Research Toronto

Curriculum Vitæ

Contact

Email: jacobson@cs.toronto.edu

Office: Bahen Center, 40 St. George Street, Room 5266, Toronto

Phone: +1 416 946 86 30

Fax: +1 416 978 38 71

Post: Alec Jacobson
Department of Computer Science
University of Toronto
40 St. George Street
Room 4283
Toronto, ON
M5S 2E4 Canada

Publications

A LoRA is Worth a Thousand Pictures
Chenxi Liu, Towaki Takikawa, Alec Jacobson
ArXiv 2024
Paper (Arxiv)

RoMo: Robust Motion Segmentation Improves Structure from Motion
Lily Goli, Sara Sabour, Mark Matthews, Marcus Brubaker, Dmitry Lagun, Alec Jacobson, David J. Fleet, Saurabh Saxena, Andrea Tagliasacchi
ArXiv 2024
Project Page | Paper (Arxiv)

SpotlessSplats: Ignoring Distractors in 3D Gaussian Splatting
Lily Goli, Sara Sabour, George Kopanas, Mark Matthews, Dmitry Lagun, Leonidas Guibas, Alec Jacobson, David J. Fleet, Andrea Tagliasacchi
ArXiv 2024
Project Page | Paper (Arxiv)

2D Neural Fields with Learned Discontinuities
Chenxi Liu, Siqi Wang, Matthew Fisher, Deepali Aneja, Alec Jacobson
ArXiv 2024
Paper (Arxiv)

Text-guided Controllable Mesh Refinement for Interactive 3D Modeling
Yun-Chun Chen, Selena Ling, Zhiqin Chen, Vladimir G. Kim, Matheus Gadelha, Alec Jacobson
ACM SIGGRAPH Asia 2024
Paper (Arxiv) | Project Page

Trust-Region Eigenvalue Filtering for Projected Newton
Honglin Chen, Hsueh-Ti Derek Liu, Alec Jacobson, David I.W. Levin, Changxi Zheng
ACM SIGGRAPH Asia 2024
Paper (Arxiv) | Project Page

Sharpening and Sparsifying with Surface Hessians
Dylan Rowe, Alec Jacobson, Oded Stein
ACM SIGGRAPH Asia 2024
Paper | Project Page

Cascading upper bounds for triangle soup Pompeiu-Hausdorff distance
Leonardo Sacht, Alec Jacobson
Eurographics/ACM SIGGRAPH Symposium on Geometry Processing 2024
🏆 Best Paper Honourable Mention 🏆
Paper (Arxiv) | Supplemental | Code

Optimized Dual-Volumes for Tetrahedral Meshes
Alec Jacobson
Eurographics/ACM SIGGRAPH Symposium on Geometry Processing 2024
Paper (Arxiv)

Surface-Filling Curve Flows via Implicit Medial Axes
Yuta Noma, Silvia Sellán, Nicholas Sharp, Karan Singh, Alec Jacobson
ACM SIGGRAPH North America^? 2024
Project | Paper

Stabler Neo-Hookean Simulation: Absolute Eigenvalue Filtering for Projected Newton
Honglin Chen, Hsueh-Ti Derek Liu, David I.W. Levin, Changxi Zheng, Alec Jacobson
ACM SIGGRAPH North America 2024
Project | Paper (arxiv)

Gender Diversity of Graphics Conference Leadership
Alec Jacobson
ACM SIGGRAPH North America “Talks” 2024
Blog post

I❤️Mesh: A DSL for Mesh Processing
Yong Li, Shoaib Kamil, Keenan Crane, Alec Jacobson, Yotam Gingold
ACM Transactions on Graphics 2024
Paper

VecFusion: Vector Font Generation with Diffusion
Vikas Thamizharasan, Difan Liu, Shantanu Agarwal, Matthew Fisher, Michael Gharbi, Oliver Wang, Alec Jacobson, Evangelos Kalogerakis
CVPR 2024
🏆 Highlight 🏆
Paper (Arxiv)

Bayes’ Rays: Uncertainty Quantification for Neural Radiance Fields
Lily Goli, Cody Reading, Silvia Sellán, Alec Jacobson, Andrea Tagliasacchi
CVPR 2024
🏆 Highlight 🏆
Project | Paper

Neural Stochastic Screened Poisson Surface Reconstruction
Silvia Sellán, Alec Jacobson
ACM SIGGRAPH Asia 2023
Paper (Arxiv)

Constructive Solid Geometry On Neural Signed Distance Fields
Zoë Marschner, Silvia Sellán, Hsueh-Ti Derek Liu, Alec Jacobson
ACM SIGGRAPH Asia 2023
Project | Paper | Paper (low res)

Compact Neural Graphic Primitives with Learned Hash Probing
Towaki Takikawa, Thomas Müller, Merlin Nimier-David, Alex Evans, Sanja Fidler, Alec Jacobson, Alexander Keller
ACM SIGGRAPH Asia 2023
Paper (Coming Later)

An Adaptive Fast-Multipole-Accelerated Hybrid Boundary Integral Equation Method For Accurate Diffusion Curves
ACM SIGGRAPH Asia 2023
Seungbae Bang, Kirill Serkh, Oded Stein, Alec Jacobson
Paper (Arxiv)

Progressive Shell Quasistatics for Unstructured Meshes
ACM SIGGRAPH Asia 2023
Jiayi Eris Zhang, Jérémie Dumas, Yun (Raymond) Fei, Alec Jacobson, Doug L. James, Danny M. Kaufman
Paper (Coming Later)

Bézier Spline Simplification Using Locally Integrated Error Metrics
ACM SIGGRAPH Asia 2023
Siqi Wang, Chenxi Liu, Daniele Panozzo, Denis Zorin, Alec Jacobson
Paper (Coming Later)

Fast Complementary Dynamics via Skinning Eigenmodes
Otman Benchekroun, Jiayi Eris Zhang, Siddhartha Chaudhuri, Eitan Grinspun, Yi Zhou, Alec Jacobson
ACM SIGGRAPH North America 2023
Paper (Arxiv)

Differentiable Heightfield Path Tracing with Accelerated Discontinuities
Xiaochun Tong, Hsueh-Ti Derek Liu, Yotam Gingold, Alec Jacobson
ACM SIGGRAPH North America 2023
Paper

Neural Progressive Meshes
Yun-Chun Chen, Vladimir G. Kim, Noam Aigerman, Alec Jacobson
ACM SIGGRAPH North America 2023
Paper | Paper (low res)

Surface Simplification using Intrinsic Error Metrics
Hsueh-Ti Derek Liu, Mark Gillespie, Benjamin Chislett, Nicholas Sharp, Alec Jacobson, Keenan Crane
ACM SIGGRAPH North America 2023
Paper (Arxiv)

Data-Free Learning of Reduced-Order Kinematics
Nicholas Sharp, Cristian Romero Garcia, David Levin, Alec Jacobson,, Etienne Vouga, Paul Kry, Justin Solomon
ACM SIGGRAPH North America 2023
Paper (Arxiv)

OptCtrlPoints: Optimizing Control Points for Biharmonic 3D Shape Deformation
Kunho Kim, Mikaela Angelina Uy, Despoina Paschalidou, Alec Jacobson, Leonidas Guibas, Minhyuk Sung
Pacific Graphics 2023
Paper (Arxiv)

VectorAdam for Rotation Equivariant Geometry Optimization
Selena Ling, Nicholas Sharp, Alec Jacobson
Neural Information Processing Systems 2022
Project | Paper (ArXiv)

Stochastic Poisson Surface Reconstruction
Silvia Sellán, Alec Jacobson
ACM SIGGRAPH Asia 2022
Project | Paper | Paper (ArXiv)

H❤️rtDown: Document Processor for Executable Linear Algebra Papers
Yong Li, Shoaib Kamil, Alec Jacobson, Yotam Gingold
ACM SIGGRAPH Asia 2022
Project | Paper

Progressive Simulation for Cloth Quasistatics
Jiayi Eris Zhang, Jérémie Dumas, Yun (Raymond) Fei, Alec Jacobson, Doug L. James, Danny M. Kaufman
ACM SIGGRAPH Asia 2022
Project | Paper

BoolSurf : Boolean Operations on Surfaces
Marzia Riso, Giacomo Nazzaro, Enrico Puppo, Alec Jacobson, Qingnan Zhou, Fabio Pellacini
ACM SIGGRAPH Asia 2022
Project | Paper

Breaking Good: Fracture Modes for Realtime Destruction
Silvia Sellán, Jack Luong, Letícia Mattos Da Silva, Aravind Ramakrishnan, Yuchuan Yang, Alec Jacobson
ACM Transactions on Graphics 2022
Project | Paper (ArXiv)

Breaking Bad: A Dataset for Geometric Fracture and Reassembly
Silvia Sellán, Yun-Chun Chen, Ziyi Wu, Animesh Garg, Alec Jacobson
Neural Information Processing Systems 2022, Datasets & Benchmarks Track
Project | Paper (ArXiv)
🏆 Featured Paper Presentation 🏆

Spelunking the Deep: Guaranteed Queries on General Neural Implicit Surfaces via Range Analysis
Nicholas Sharp, Alec Jacobson
ACM SIGGRAPH North America 2022 Paper (ArXiv)
🏆 Best Paper Award 🏆

Learning Smooth Neural Functions via Lipschitz Regularization
Hsueh-Ti Derek Liu, Francis Williams, Alec Jacobson, Sanja Fidler, Or Litany
ACM SIGGRAPH North America 2022
Project page | Paper | Paper (ArXiv)

Variable Bitrate Neural Fields
Towaki Takikawa, Alex Evans, Jonathan Tremblay, Thomas Müller, Morgan McGuire,
Alec Jacobson, Sanja Fidler
ACM SIGGRAPH North America 2022
Project page | Paper

Neural Shape Mating: Self-Supervised Object Assembly with Adversarial Shape Priors
Yun-Chun Chen, Haoda Li, Dylan Turpin, Alec Jacobson, Animesh Garg
CVPR 2022
Project page | Paper (ArXiv)

Active Learning Neural C-space Signed Distance Fields for Reduced Deformable Self-Collision
Xinhao Cai, Eulalie Coevoet, Alec Jacobson, Paul Kry
Graphics Interface 2022
Paper

I❤️LA: Compilable Markdown for Linear Algebra
Yong Li, Shoaib Kamil, Alec Jacobson, Yotam Gingold
ACM SIGGRAPH Asia 2021
Rethinking ML Papers - ICLR 2021 Workshop
Project page | Paper | Paper (ArXiv)

Large Steps in Inverse Rendering of Geometry
Baptiste Nicolet, Alec Jacobson, Wenzel Jakob
ACM SIGGRAPH Asia 2021
Project page | Paper

Surface Multigrid via Intrinsic Prolongation
Hsueh-Ti Derek Liu, Jiayi Eris Zhang, Mirela Ben Chen, Alec Jacobson
ACM SIGGRAPH North America 2021
Project page | Paper | Paper (ArXiv)

Swept Volumes via Spacetime Numerical Continuation
Silvia Sellán, Noam Aigerman, Alec Jacobson
ACM SIGGRAPH North America 2021
Project page | Paper | Paper (low res)

Interactive Modelling of Volumetric Musculoskeletal Anatomy
Rinat Abdrashitov, Seungbae Bang, David I.W. Levin, Karan Singh, Alec Jacobson
ACM SIGGRAPH North America 2021
Project page | Paper | Paper (low res)

Neural Geometric Level of Detail: Real-time Rendering with Implicit 3D Shapes
Towaki Takikawa, Joey Litalien, Kangxue Yin, Karsten Kreis, Charles Loop, Derek Nowrouzezahrai, Alec Jacobson, Morgan McGuire, Sanja Fidler
CVPR 2021
Paper (ArXiv) | Project page

Supporting Reference Imagery for Digital Drawing
ICCV Workshop on Sketching for Human Expressivity 2021
Josh Holinaty, Alec Jacobson, Fanny Chevalier
Paper

Normal-Driven Spherical Shape Analogies
Hsueh-Ti Derek Liu, Alec Jacobson
Eurographics/ACM SIGGRAPH Symposium on Geometry Processing 2021
Paper (ArXiv)

Levitating Rigid Objects with Hidden Rods and Wires
Sarah Kushner, Risa Ulinski, Karan Singh, David I.W. Levin, Alec Jacobson
Eurographics 2021
Paper | ArXiv preprint | Project

Fast Updates for Least-Squares Rotational Alignment
Jiayi Eris Zhang, Alec Jacobson, Marc Alexa
Eurographics 2021
Paper | Project page

Scrappy: Using Scrap Material as Infill to Make Fabrication More Sustainable
Ludwig Wilhelm Wall, Alec Jacobson, Daniel Vogel, Oliver Schneider
ACM CHI 2021
Paper | Project page

On the Effectiveness of Weight-Encoded Neural Implicit 3D Shapes
Thomas Davies, Derek Nowrouzezahrai, Alec Jacobson
Technical Report 2021
Paper (ArXiv)

Role-Playing Paper-Reading Seminars
Alec Jacobson, Colin Raffel
Pedagogy Report 2021
Blog post | PDF

Learning Deformable Tetrahedral Meshes for 3D Reconstruction
Jun Gao, Wenzheng Chen, Tommy Xiang, Alec Jacobson, Morgan Mcguire, Sanja Fidler
Neural Information Processing Systems 2020
Paper | Project page

Complementary Dynamics
Jiayi Eris Zhang, Seungbae Bang, David I.W. Levin, Alec Jacobson
ACM SIGGRAPH Asia 2020
Paper | Paper (low res) | Project

Opening and Closing Surfaces
Silvia Sellán, Jacob Kesten, Ang Yan Sheng, Alec Jacobson
ACM SIGGRAPH Asia 2020
Paper | Project

Chordal Decomposition for Spectral Coarsening
Honglin Chen, Hsueh-Ti Derek Liu, Alec Jacobson, David I.W. Levin
ACM SIGGRAPH Asia 2020
Paper | Project

Developability of Heightfields via Rank Minimization
Silvia Sellán, Noam Aigerman, Alec Jacobson
ACM SIGGRAPH North America 2020
Paper | Project

Neural Subdivision
Hsueh-Ti Derek Liu, Vladimir G. Kim, Siddhartha Chaudhuri, Noam Aigerman, Alec Jacobson
ACM SIGGRAPH North America 2020
Paper | Paper (low res) | Project

A Smoothness Energy without Boundary Distortion for Curved Surfaces
Oded Stein, Alec Jacobson, Max Wardetzky, Eitan Grinspun
ACM Transactions on Graphics 2020
Paper | Paper (low res) | Project

EMU: Efficient Muscle Simulation in Deformation Space
Vismay Modi, Lawson Fulton, Shinjiro Sueda, Alec Jacobson, David I.W. Levin
Computer Graphics Forum 2020
Paper | Paper (low res) | Project

A Simple Discretization of the Vector Dirichlet Energy
Oded Stein, Max Wardetzky, Alec Jacobson, Eitan Grinspun
Eurographics/ACM SIGGRAPH Symposium on Geometry Processing 2020
Paper | Project | Talk

Spectral Mesh Simplification
Thibault Lescoat, Hsueh-Ti Derek Liu, Jean-Marc Thiery, Alec Jacobson, Tamy Boubekeur, Maks Ovsjanikov
Eurographics 2020
Paper | Paper (low res) | Project

Interacting with Self-Similarity
Josef Graus, Alec Jacobson, Yotam Gingold
Computer-Aided Design 2020
Paper | Paper (low res) | Project page

A System for Efficient 3D Printed Stop-Motion Face Animation
Rinat Abdrashitov, Alec Jacobson, Karan Singh
ACM Transactions on Graphics 2019
Paper | Paper (low res) | Project

A mixed finite element method with piecewise linear elements for the biharmonic equation on surfaces
Oded Stein, Eitan Grinspun, Alec Jacobson, Max Wardetzky
Technical Report 2019
ArXiv

Cubic Stylization
Hsueh-Ti Derek Liu, Alec Jacobson
ACM SIGGRAPH Asia 2019
Paper | Paper (low res) | Project page

Non-Linear Sphere Tracing for Rendering Deformed Signed Distance Fields
Dario Seyb, Alec Jacobson, Derek Nowrouzezahrai, Wojciech Jarosz
ACM SIGGRAPH Asia 2019
Paper | Project

Learning to Predict 3D Objects with an Interpolation-based Differentiable Renderer
Wenzheng Chen, Jun Gao, Huan Ling, Edward J. Smith, Jaakko Lehtinen, Alec Jacobson, Sanja Fidler
Neural Information Processing Systems 2019
Paper | Project

Spectral Coarsening of Geometric Operators
Hsueh-Ti Derek Liu, Alec Jacobson, Maks Ovsjanikov
ACM SIGGRAPH North America 2019
Paper | Paper (low res) | Project

TriWild: Robust Triangulation with Curve Constraints
Yixin Hu, Teseo Schneider, Xifeng Gao, Qingnan Zhou, Alec Jacobson, Denis Zorin, Daniele Panozzo
ACM SIGGRAPH North America 2019
Paper | Paper (low res)

Beyond Pixel Norm-Balls: Parametric Adversaries using an Analytically Differentiable Renderer
Hsueh-Ti Derek Liu, Michael Tao, Chun-Liang Li, Derek Nowrouzezahrai, Alec Jacobson
ICLR 2019
Paper | ArXiv 2018

Latent-space Dynamics for Reduced Deformable Simulation
Lawson Fulton, Vismay Modi, David Duvenaud, David I. W. Levin, Alec Jacobson
Eurographics 2019
Paper | Paper (low res) | Project

Volumetric Michell Trusses for Parametric Design & Fabrication
Rahul Arora, Alec Jacobson, Timothy R. Langlois, Yijiang Huang, Caitlin Mueller, Wojciech Matusik, Ariel Shamir, Karan Singh, David I.W. Levin
ACM Symposium on Computational Fabrication, 2019
Paper | Paper (low res) | ArXiv 2018 | Project

Interactive Design of Castable Shapes using Two-Piece Rigid Molds
Oded Stein, Alec Jacobson, Eitan Grinspun
Computers & Graphics 2019
Paper

RodSteward: A Design-to-Assembly System for Fabrication using 3D-Printed Joints and Precision-Cut Rods
Alec Jacobson
Pacific Graphics 2019
Paper | Paper (low res) | ArXiv | Project

Geometry Processing in the Wild
Alec Jacobson
Keynote
Talk Slides | Video

Solid Geometry Processing on Deconstructed Domains
Silvia Sellán, Herng Yi Cheng, Yuming Ma, Mitchell Dembowski, Alec Jacobson
Computer Graphics Forum 2018
Paper | Paper (low res) | ArXiv preprint | Project

Paparazzi: Surface Editing by way of Multi-View Image Processing
Hsueh-Ti Derek Liu, Michael Tao, Alec Jacobson
ACM SIGGRAPH Asia 2018
Paper | Paper (low res) | Project

Fast Winding Numbers for Soups and Clouds
Gavin Barill, Nia Dickson, Ryan Schmidt, David I.W. Levin, Alec Jacobson
ACM SIGGRAPH North America 2018
Paper | Paper (low res) | Project

Tetrahedral Meshing in the Wild
Yixin Hu, Qingnan Zhou, Xifeng Gao, Alec Jacobson, Denis Zorin, Daniele Panozzo
ACM SIGGRAPH North America 2018
Paper | Paper (low res) | GitHub

Natural Boundary Conditions for Smoothing in Geometry Processing
Oded Stein, Eitan Grinspun, Max Wardetzky, Alec Jacobson
ACM Transactions on Graphics 2018
Paper | Paper (low res) | Project | ArXiv (2017)

Collision-Aware and Online Compression of Rigid Body Simulations via Integrated Error Minimization
Timothy Jeruzalski, John Kanji, Alec Jacobson, David I.W. Levin
ACM SIGGRAPH/Eurographics Symposium on Computer Animation 2018
Paper | Paper (low res) | Project

Seamless Reconstruction of Part-Based High-Relief Models from Hand-Drawn Images
Marek Dvorožňák, Saman Sepehri Nejad, Ondřej Jamriška, Alec Jacobson, Ladislav Kavan, Daniel Sýkora
Expressive, 2018
Paper | Project

Seamless: Seam erasure and seam-aware decoupling of shape from mesh resolution
Songrun Liu, Zachary Ferguson, Alec Jacobson, Yotam Gingold
ACM SIGGRAPH Asia 2017
Paper | Paper (low res) | Project

Generalized Matryoshka: Computational Design of Nesting Objects
Alec Jacobson
Eurographics/ACM SIGGRAPH Symposium on Geometry Processing 2017
Paper | Paper (low res) | Project

A Dirac Operator for Extrinsic Shape Analysis
Hsueh-Ti Derek Liu, Alec Jacobson, Keenan Crane
Eurographics/ACM SIGGRAPH Symposium on Geometry Processing 2017
Paper | Paper (low res) | Project

libigl: A simple C++ geometry processing library
Alec Jacobson, Daniele Panozzo, and others
libigl on GitHub
Eurographics/ACM SIGGRAPH Symposium on Geometry Processing 2014 Graduate School
Course notes
Eurographics/ACM SIGGRAPH Symposium on Geometry Processing 2017 Graduate School
Course video
ACM SIGGRAPH Asia Courses 2017

Thingi10K: A Dataset of 10,000 3D-Printing Models
Qingnan Zhou, Alec Jacobson
Technical Report 2016
Paper | Thingi10K dataset

Mesh Arrangements for Solid Geometry
Qingnan Zhou, Eitan Grinspun, Denis Zorin, Alec Jacobson
ACM SIGGRAPH North America 2016
Paper | Paper (low res) | Project | Code in libigl

Computational Design of Reconfigurables
Akash Garg, Alec Jacobson, Eitan Grinspun
ACM SIGGRAPH North America 2016
Paper | Paper (low res) | Project

Rig Animation with a Tangible and Modular Input Device
Oliver Glauser, Wan-Chun Ma, Daniele Panozzo, Alec Jacobson, Otmar Hilliges, Olga Sorkine-Hornung.
ACM SIGGRAPH North America 2016
Paper | Project

Physically Based Video Editing
Jean-Charles Bazin, Claudia Plüss (Kuster), Guo Yu, Tobias Martin, Alec Jacobson, Markus Gross
Pacific Graphics 2016
Paper | Paper (low res)

Nested Cages
Leonardo Sacht, Etienne Vouga, Alec Jacobson
ACM SIGGRAPH Asia 2015
Paper | Paper (low res) | Project | Code on GitHub

Breathing Life into Shapes
Alec Jacobson
Computer Graphics & Applications 2015, invited by Jim Foley
Paper

gptoolbox: MATLAB Toolbox for Geometry Processing
Alec Jacobson, and others
gptoolbox on GitHub | gptoolbox on File Exchange

Large-Scale Painting of Photographs by Interactive Optimization
Romain Prévost, Alec Jacobson, Wojciech Jarosz, Olga Sorkine-Hornung
Computers & Graphics 2015
Paper | Graphics Interface 2016 Slides | Project

Skinning Cubic Bézier Splines and Catmull-Clark Subdivision Surfaces
Songrun Liu, Alec Jacobson, Yotam Gingold
ACM SIGGRAPH Asia 2014
Paper | Paper (low res) | Project | 2D Code on GitHub | 3D Code on GitHub

Fast and Memory-Efficient Topological Denoising of 2D and 3D Scalar Fields
David Günther, Alec Jacobson, Jan Reininghaus, Hans-Peter Seidel, Olga Sorkine-Hornung, Tino Weinkauf
IEEE SciVis 2014
Paper | Paper (low res) | Project

Tangible and Modular Input Device for Character Articulation
Alec Jacobson, Daniele Panozzo, Oliver Glauser, Cédric Pradalier, Otmar Hilliges, Olga Sorkine-Hornung
ACM SIGGRAPH North America 2014, SIGGRAPH North America 2014 E-tech, UIST 2014 Demos, Cinekid 2015
Paper | Paper (low res) | Project page | Code on GitHub

Skinning: Real-time Shape Deformation
Alec Jacobson, Zhigang Deng, Ladislav Kavan, J.P. Lewis
ACM SIGGRAPH North America 2014 Course, ACM SIGGRAPH Asia 2014 Invited Course, SGP 2015 Invited Course
skinning.org course page

Bounded Biharmonic Weights for Real-Time Deformation
Alec Jacobson, Ilya Baran, Jovan Popović, Olga Sorkine
Communications of the ACM 2014, Research Highlights
Paper | Preface by Joe Warren | 中国版 (translated by Kun Zhou) | Original Project Page

Ink-and-Ray: Bas-Relief Meshes for Adding Global Illumination Effects to Hand-Drawn Characters
Daniel Sýkora, Ladislav Kavan, Martin Čadík, Ondřej Jamriška, Alec Jacobson, Brian Whited, Maryann Simmons, Olga Sorkine-Hornung
ACM Transactions on Graphics 2014
Paper | Paper (low res) | Project

A Simple Method for Correcting Facet Orientations in Polygon Meshes Based on Ray Casting
Kenshi Takayama, Alec Jacobson, Ladislav Kavan, Olga Sorkine-Hornung
Journal of Computer Graphics Tools 2014
Paper | Paper (low res) | Code in libigl

Consistently Orienting Facets in Polygon Meshes by Minimizing the Dirichlet Energy of Generalized Winding Numbers
Kenshi Takayama, Alec Jacobson, Ladislav Kavan, Olga Sorkine-Hornung
Technical Report 2014
Paper

Schur complement trick for positive semi-definite energies
Alec Jacobson
Technical Report 2014
Paper

Bijective mappings with generalized barycentric coordinates: a counterexample
Alec Jacobson
Journal of Graphics Tools 2013
Paper | 2012 Technical Report

Consistent Volumetric Discretizations Inside Self-Intersecting Surfaces
Leonardo Sacht, Alec Jacobson, Daniele Panozzo, Christian Schüller, Olga Sorkine-Hornung
Eurographics/ACM SIGGRAPH Symposium on Geometry Processing 2013
Project | Paper | Paper (low res) | Code in gptoolbox

Algorithms and Interfaces for Real-Time Deformation of 2D and 3D Shapes
Alec Jacobson
PhD Thesis, ETH Zurich, 2013
Thesis | Thesis (low res) | Slides | Slides (low res)

Transfusive Image Manipulation
Kaan Yücer, Alec Jacobson, Alexander Hornung, Olga Sorkine
ACM SIGGRAPH Asia 2012
Project | Paper | Paper (low res)

A Cotangent Laplacian for Images as Surfaces
Alec Jacobson and Olga Sorkine
Technical Report, 2012
Subproject page | Paper

Mixed Finite Elements for Variational Surface Modeling
Alec Jacobson, Elif Tosun, Olga Sorkine, Denis Zorin
Eurographics/ACM SIGGRAPH Symposium on Geometry Processing 2010
Project | Paper | Paper (low res) | Slides | Slides (low res)

Current Students and Postdocs

Former lab members

Silvia Sellán (PhD 2024), next stop: faculty at Columbia University
Aravind Ramakrishnan (MSc 2024)
Hsueh-Ti Derek Liu (PhD 2022), next stop: Roblox Research
Nicholas Sharp (postdoc 2022), next stop: Nvidia Research
Seungbae Bang (postdoc 2022), next stop: Amazon Research
Teemu Tyni (postdoc 2022), next stop: faculty at University of Oulu
Otman Benchekroun (MSc 2022), next stop: PhD candidate at University of Toronto
Sarah Kushner
Thomas Davies (MSc 2021) next stop: Autodesk
Jiayi Eris Zhang (BSc 2021) next stop: PhD candidate at Stanford
Dale Hayward
Josh Holinaty (MSc 2021) next stop: Improbable Canada
Risa Ulinski
Etienne Corman (postdoc 2019) next stop: faculty at CNRS
Junrui Xu (MScAc 2019) next stop: Rockmass
Gavin Barill (MSc 2019) next stop: PhD candidate at McGill Math Department
Lawson Fulton (MSc 2019) next stop: MESH Inc.
Aditya Sanghi (MScAC 2019) next stop: Autodesk
Timothy Jeruzalski (MSc 2018) next stop: imgix

Teaching

University of Toronto Geometry Processing - Fall 2022
University of Toronto Geometry Processing - Fall 2020
University of Toronto Geometry Processing - Fall 2018
University of Toronto Geometry Processing - Winter 2018
University of Toronto Geometry Processing - Winter 2017
Open Source Assignments on GitHub

University of Toronto Seminar on Geometry and Animation - Fall 2022
University of Toronto Seminar on Geometry and Animation - Fall 2020
University of Toronto Seminar on Geometry and Animation - Fall 2019
Columbia University Seminar in Geometry and Animation - Spring 2015

University of Toronto Computer Graphics - Winter 2022
University of Toronto Computer Graphics - Fall 2019
University of Toronto Computer Graphics - Fall 2018
University of Toronto Computer Graphics - Fall 2017
University of Toronto Computer Graphics - Fall 2016
Open Source Assignments on GitHub

ETH Zurich Adv. Graphics and Vision - Fall 2013

ETH Zurich Computer Graphics - Fall 2013 (TA)
ETH Zurich Computer Graphics - Fall 2012 (TA)
ETH Zurich Computer Graphics - Fall 2011 (TA)

cSplash Introduction to LaTeX course, 2008, 2009

Other websites

alecjacobson.com/weblog

calendar

Short bio

Alec Jacobson is an Associate Professor and Canada Research Chair in the Departments of Computer Science and Mathematics at University of Toronto. He is also a Senior Research Scientist at Adobe Research, Toronto. Before his post‑doc at Columbia University, he received a PhD in Computer Science from ETH Zurich advised by Prof. Olga Sorkine‑Hornung, and an MA and BA in Computer Science and Mathematics from the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, New York University. His work spans all aspects of geometry processing, including machine learning for 2D/3D geometry, physics-based simulation, computational fabrication, numerical methods for geometric energies and PDEs, and interactive design tools for 2D and 3D. He has published several papers in the proceedings of ACM SIGGRAPH. He leads development of the widely used geometry processing library, libigl, winner of the 2015 SGP software award. In 2020, he received the ACM SIGGRAPH Significant New Researcher Award. In 2022, he received a Sloan Research Fellowship. In 2023, he received an Outstanding Teaching Award and a CS-Can/Info-Can Outstanding Early Career Computer Science Research Award.

Acknowledgments

Our research is funded in part by NSERC Discovery (RGPIN–2022–04680), the Ontario Early Research Award program, the Canada Research Chairs Program, a Sloan Research Fellowship, the DSI Catalyst Grant program and gifts by Adobe Inc.

Frequently Asked Questions

These are some questions that I receive fairly regularly in cold-call emails.

Will you hire me as a PhD Student?

Maybe! The first step is to apply directly to the graduate program of the Department of Computer Science or Department of Mathematics. Our regular deadline is in December for students applying to start in the following Fall. Our program is very competitive. Most students put months of effort into their application package. Your research interests should match or harmonize with mine (see publications above for an idea). You should not only mention this in your application (and mention me by name), but also write about how and why we’re a great match. If you’d like to chat about research or life at dgp as a graduate student, feel free to contact me.

Will you hire me as a postdoc?

Maybe! Postdoc positions are very limited. If I’m not already aware of your research then chances are much smaller. In any case, contact me to begin the conversation. Have a one-to-two year research agenda prepared.

In nearly all circumstances, I will ask you to apply for a postdoc fellowship (and I will help you apply). Please review relevant fellowships, including those specifically for Canadian permanent residences (if applicable) or “mobility” fellowships from your home country/country of PhD.

I’m an undergrad from University of Toronto, could I work as your research

assistant?

Maybe! Undergraduate research assistantships are limited and competitive. You should be a proficient programmer and feel confident in Calculus and Linear Algebra. If you haven’t already, sign up for the undergraduate Computer Graphics course and my graduate-level Geometry Processing course (and probably also David Levin’s Computational Fabrication and Kyros Kutulakus’s Foundations of Computational Vision courses). Good performance in these courses will put you at a great advantage. Also, start attending the dgp graphics reading group and the dgp graphics seminar talks. If you’re hoping to work with me over the summer, reach out to me around January/February. Give an indication of what research of mine most interests you and what sort of way you could imagine yourself contributing (in practice, we will try to find a current project to match you with, but this information will help).

I’m an undergrad from X ≠ Unversity of Toronto, could I work as a your

research assistant?

Maybe! External undergraduate research assistantships are even more limited than internal ones. If you can secure or apply for funding from your home institution or country then you will be at a great advantage. If you do not already have a funding source, then before contacting me investigate whether fellowships for exchange programs etc. exist in your institution/country. If there are none, then consider applying to one of the summer undergraduate research fellowship programs at University of Toronto (e.g., at the Fields Institute). Finally, if you still cannot find funding, contact me with an application including a statement of purpose, faculty references, (unofficial) transcripts, and resume.