Marie-Paule Cani is Professor of Computer Science at Grenoble-INP/Ensimag. She is scientific leader of the IMAGINE team, a joint venture between Inria and the Jean Kuntzmann Laboratory (CNRS, Grenoble-Alpes University). An alumnus of the École normale supérieure, she holds a doctorate from the University of Paris-XI (1990) and an habilitation to direct research from the INPG (1995). A Junior Member of the Institut Universitaire de France in 1999, she was awarded the title ofEurographics Fellow in 2005. She was awarded the Irène Joliot-Curie Mentoring Prize in 2007 for her actions in favor of women scientists, and was elected a member of theAcademia Europaea in 2013.
A researcher in computer graphics, she is interested in the creation of digital content for animated virtual worlds, which has led her to tackle the intuitive modeling of 3D shapes as well as their interactive animation. Over the years, she has contributed to the development of high-level models for shapes - including, in particular, implicit surfaces - to efficient physical animation methods, often adaptive or multi-resolution, and to the development of hybrid representations for synthesizing natural scenes animated in real time. Her long-standing interest in virtual sculpture has recently led her to explore innovative approaches to the creation of 3D content, such as the combination of sketch-based interfaces and procedural models expressing knowledge. Her recent work develops the new concept of responsive shapes, user-centered graphic models designed to respond in the expected way to modeling gestures. She received the Eurographics Outstanding Technical Contributions Award in 2011 for this work, as well as an Advanced Grant from theEuropean Research Council (ERC) and the CNRS Silver Medal in 2012.
Marie-Paule Cani has been a member of the program committees of major conferences in her field, and has regularly chaired programs or co-organized conferences. She has been or is a member of the steering committees of the SCA(Symposium on Computer Animation), SBIM(Sketch-based Interfaces and Modeling) and SMI(Shape Modeling International) conferences, as well as the editorial boards of Graphical Models, IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics (TVCG), Computer Graphics Forum (CGF) and currently ACM Transactions on Graphics (TOG). Director at large on theACM SIGGRAPH Executive Committee from 2007 to 2011, she represented computer graphics on theACM Publication Board from 2011 to 2014. Active in the Association française d'informatique graphique (AFIG) since the 1990s, she helped set up the French chapter ofEurographics in 2003, of which she was the first president. She is now a member of the steering committee of the GDR IG-RV (informatique géométrique et graphique, réalité virtuelle et visualisation) of the CNRS and vice-president of the European association Eurographics since January 2013.