IIT-Kharagpur alumnus garners prestigious ‘Technical Oscar’

An IIT Kharagpur alumnus has won the prestigious Technical Achievement Award (the Scientific & Technical Awards prize), popularly called the `Technical Oscar’, awarded by the Academy of Motion Pictures and Sciences.

Parag Havaldar, who graduated from IIT-Kharagpur in 1991 with a degree in computer science and engineering, has been awarded for “the development of expression-based facial performance-capture technology at Sony Pictures Imageworks”.

A software supervisor at Sony Pictures Imageworks, Havaldar leads the team in the area of performance capture. The technology developed by him and his team has been used to create stylized character animations.

The Academy webpage reads, “This pioneering system has enabled large-scale use of animation rig-based facial performance-capture for motion pictures, combining solutions for tracking, stabilization, solving and animator controllable curve editing.”

Elated by his student’s win, IIT-Kgp director and Havaldar’s first programming teacher, P P Chakraborty said, “It is heartening to see how Parag’s interest in image processing, which germinated from his project work at IIT-Kgp, has flowered into a technical art which has now been recognised by the prestigious award.”.

Havaldar’s project guide for his BTech degree, Partha Pratim Das, said, “He was a sincere student, who struck me with his unique ideas of experimentation. He had the seeds of an original product developer.”