Eurographics .:: European Association for Computer Graphics

Eurographics Honorary Fellowship

Frits Post (1947) is an internationally very well-known researcher in the field of scientific visualization, who has provided crucial contributions to the development of scientific visualization in Europe. For many of us, his guidance, wisdom and friendship have had a great impact.

Frits is currently an associate professor Computer Science (computer graphics) at Delft University of Technology (DUT) and will retire in 2011. He started with computer graphics already in the seventies. He studied Industrial Design Engineering at Delft University of Technology, and for his graduation project in the Ergonomics Group he developed ADAPS, which stands for Anthropometric Design Assessment Program System. ADAPS was a highly useful interactive graphics system for the assessment of workspace design, which has been used and developed further until this very day. In 1983 he moved from Industrial Design Engineering to Computer Science, where he became associate professor in 1985. Initially he worked on geometric modelling, in the late eighties he started to study scientific visualization.

The last two decades he and his students have produced many new methods and techniques for visualization. Frits has a keen eye for spotting emerging challenges and new directions for solutions, was very successful in attracting bright students and guiding them, and has provided many seminal contributions. In the nineties his main topic was flow visualization, where he and his students studied visualization of turbulent flow, feature extraction and tracking, selective visualization, comparative visualization, and texture based visualization. In the late nineties he became interested in the use of virtual reality techniques for visualization. He and his students developed novel techniques for 3D interaction and studied how large data sets can be browsed through using a virtual desktop. Also he started to work on medical visualization, leading to a steady stream of results on rendering issues, processing of large data-sets, classification, interaction, and feature detection. He has published more than 80 papers, many in top journals and conferences such as IEEE TVCG, Computer Graphics Forum, IEEE Visualization, and MICCAI.

Frits has played a central role in the development and organization of the field, and especially provided crucial contributions to visualization in Europe. He has guided the field in a steady, persistent, and always friendly and diplomatic way, and served as a model for many of later generations. He has been a member of Eurographics since 1982 and has been very active within the association. He has been a member of the Executive Committee and Vice Chairman; he is chair of the Working Group on Visualization in Scientific Computing; he has been member of numerous programme committees of Eurographics conferences and workshops and best paper committees. Outside Eurographics, he was a member of the Executive Committee of the IEEE Computer Society Technical Committee on Computer Graphics; has been involved with several IEEE Visualization conferences; co-organized Dagstuhl seminars; and was associate editor of Computer Graphics Forum, IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, and ACM Transactions on Graphics.

In the visualization community, Frits was always around, approachable, and taking initiatives. His special role during the last two decades can be illustrated with three highlights. Frits was one of the pioneers that gave visualization a place in Europe and within Eurographics: In 1991 he organized the second, highly succesful Workshop on Visualization  in Scientific Computing in Delft, following up on the first one, held in Paris in 1990. Frits had a major contribution in fostering relations between Eurographics and the IEEE Computer Society Visualization and Graphics Technical Committee. This led to the joint Eurographics/IEEE Symposium on Scientific Visualization held in Vienna in May 1999, which developed later into the highly succesful EuroVis symposia. EuroVis is currently a vibrant event, with many submissions and which proceedings appear as a special issue of Computer Graphics Forum, and we are grateful for the decisive contributions of Frits in its success. A final highlight was his keynote presentation at Eurographics 2011, in which he shared his great overview of the field of data visualization and described generic common approaches. And also, one can view his presentation as a characterization of his knowledge and personality: inspiring, and always looking for novel challenges and integration.

The Eurographics Association is proud to have such an exceptional scientist and such a great personality among its members and volunteers and presents the Honorary Fellowship of the Association to Frits Post on the occasion of EuroVis 2011 in Bergen.