Maimone Honored with Inaugural Timothy L. Quigg Award
Graduate student Andrew Maimone was recognized with the Timothy L. Quigg Student Inventor of the Year Award for 2013-2014.
The award, created in 2013 in honor of then-Associate Chairman for Administration, Finance, and Entrepreneurship Timothy L. Quigg, is given to the student judged as showing the highest entrepreneurial spirit in the department, by inventorship or starting a new enterprise. The recipient receives a cash prize of $500 and has his or her name engraved on a permanent plaque in Sitterson Hall. The 2013-2014 award is the first ever given, making Andrew its first ever recipient.
Maimone was very grateful for the award, but he was also quick to acknowledge the influence of his fellow students and faculty in the Department of Computer Science.
“It’s an honor to receive this award in a department with a history of invention. I’m very fortunate to work in an environment that shares my love of building things!”
Maimone’s current research focuses on the development of new displays which use simple optics and powerful and flexible software to obtain enhanced performance and new functionality, such as wider fields of view and multiple focal depths. He is currently applying this approach to the development of augmented reality eyeglasses and desktop 3D displays. He has been involved in research spanning see-through near-eye displays, 3D displays, 3D acquisition systems, computer graphics, computer vision, and augmented and virtual reality.
Imagine that you are an engineer. A colleague sends you a 3D model that is instantly transmitted to your eyeglasses, allowing you to see the 3D model in front of you, perfectly in focus as though it were in your hands. Using simple hand gestures, you can manipulate the model to view it from any angle.
Now, imagine that you are a surgeon. Before attempting an invasive surgery, you combine several scans to form a 3D reconstruction of a patient’s internal organs in order to better plan out the surgical procedure. Maimone’s research in augmented reality will hopefully facilitate the creating of tools such as these.
During the 2013-2014 academic year, Maimone has had papers accepted by the 2013 International Symposium on Mixed and Augmented Reality (ISMAR), the 2014 International Symposium of the Society for Information Display (SID), and the 2014 Conference and Exhibition on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques (SIGGRAPH).
Maimone was one of only five nationwide recipients of a 2014 NVIDIA Fellowship worth $25,000. He also served on the IEEE Virtual Virtual Reality Conference 2014 Program Committee.
At the 2014 ACM SIGGRAPH Conference in August, Maimone presented a technical Paper; a paper to be published in ACM Transactions on Graphics, foremost peer-reviewed journal in the area of computer graphics; and an emerging technologies demo.
Timothy L. Quigg, the award’s namesake, served 22 years in the UNC Department of Computer Science before retiring at the end of May 2013.