Vanegas Nominated for Distinguished Dissertation Award
10-15-2012
Recent Computer Science Ph.D. graduate Carlos Vanegas has been selected by the Graduate School at Purdue University to be the Purdue nominee for the Council of Graduate Schools/ProQuest Distinguished Dissertation Award in Mathematics, Physical Sciences and Engineering.
Given annually since 1982 to a doctoral recipient who has already made unusually significant and original contributions to his or her field, this award is among the most prestigious in the U.S. for doctoral dissertations. Two Distinguished Dissertation Awards are given annually in two different broad areas (biological sciences; social sciences; mathematics, physical sciences, and engineering; and humanities and fine arts). Vanegas is Purdue University's sole 2012 nominee in mathematics, physical sciences, and engineering.
The nominated dissertation is titled "Modeling the Appearance and Behavior of Urban Spaces" and the examining committe approving it was chaired by Associate Professor Daniel Aliaga. Vanegas makes a manuscript and slides of his work available on his website. His research is focused on procedural methods for fast design and editing of large-scale 3D urban models, with the goal of showing that a concurrent behavioral and geometrical simulation significantly benefits the design, editing, and prediction of these models.
If his dissertation is selected by the Council of Graduate Schools, Vanegas will be presented with an honorarium and a certificate of citation at the CGS Annual Meeting during the awards luncheon Thursday, December 6, 2012.
Vanegas earned his Ph.D. from Purdue Computer Science in 2012. During his doctoral studies, he was a research assistant with the Computer Graphics and Visualization Lab under Professor Aliaga's supervision. He has published 17 peer reviewed papers, 12 of them in urban modeling,. and is currently a postdoctoral scholar at the University of California, Berkeley under the mentorship of Professor Paul Waddell.
Congratulations to Dr. Vanegas on this recognition!