Zhou Kun Wins Tan Kah Kee Young Scientist Award 2016

The Tan Kah Kee Science Awards 2016 and the Tan Kah Kee Young Scientist Awards 2016 have been unveiled recently. Prof. Zhou Kun of Zhejiang University received the Tan Kah Kee Young Scientist Award in Information Technological Sciences. The award ceremony was held at the 18th General Assembly of the Chinese Academy of Sciences on June 1.

Zhou Kun works in the College of Computer Science and Technology, Zhejiang University. He was named one of the world’s top 35 young innovators by MIT Technology Review in 2011 and elected as an IEEE Fellow in 2015. He is currently the Director of the State Key Lab of CAD & CG, and the head of the Graphics and Parallel Systems Lab. He has long engaged in research into computer vision and virtual reality and made pioneering research into real-time rendering and GPU parallel computing. He has published over 70 articles in ACM/IEEE and held more than 30 patents. He is currently acting as an editor of 5 journals, including ACM Transactions on Graphics, and on the editorial advisory board of IEEE Spectrum.

Zhou Kun won this award for his innovative work in efficient parallel real-time rendering. Such core technologies in virtual reality and cultural innovation industries as real-time rendering of a large-scale scenario pose an enormous challenge to contemporary CG research. GPU parallel computing is an effective approach to tackling these challenges. However, it requires a radical revolution on conventional texture mapping and rendering computation. Zhou Kun designs a new programming language for heterogeneous many-core systems. It allows the same program to work efficiently on all processors of a heterogeneous system and fully utilize the heterogeneous processing power by automatically distributing computations among different processors. This displays the feasibility of movie-like realistic graphic rendering at an interactive speed, ushers in a new orientation in GPU parallel computation and lays a solid foundation for the GPU realistic graphic rendering system in industry.