Benjamin Mildenhall

ACM Grace Murray Hopper Award

USA - 2025

citation

For contributions to radiance field representations, 3D scene capture and rendering, and pioneering neural implicit representations and 3D generative AI

Mildenhall and Srinivasan’s research fundamentally transformed computer graphics and vision by introducing Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF), a breakthrough that replaced decades of reliance on explicit geometric representations with differentiable neural scene representations. By encoding the structure and appearance of 3D scenes directly in the weights of neural networks and combining this with volumetric rendering, they made high-fidelity view synthesis from images fully learnable for the first time. This paradigm shift not only achieved unprecedented realism in rendering novel views, but also established the broader framework of neural fields, now widely adopted across scientific domains including medical imaging, astronomy, and computational physics.

Their work catalyzed a major new research area at the intersection of computer graphics, vision, and machine learning, inspiring rapid advances in scalable, multiscale, and photorealistic 3D modeling, as well as new connections between 2D generative models and 3D content creation. The impact of their ideas extends well beyond academia, reshaping industry and enabling a new generation of technologies for visual computing and spatial intelligence.  Their contributions underpin widely deployed systems in major products, including immersive mapping, 3D commerce, and large-scale scene visualization, and have been adopted across leading technology companies. By bridging neural rendering and generative modeling, they have driven the emergence of 3D-aware AI systems and opened a rich frontier that will shape research and applications for years to come.

Press Release

ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award

USA - 2021

Honorable Mention

citation

For his dissertation "Neural Scene Representations for View Synthesis," nominated by University of California, Berkeley

Press Release

2025 ACM Grace Murray Hopper Award

 

Ben Mildenhall, co-founder, World Labs, and Pratul Srinivasan, Research Scientist, Google DeepMind, are the recipients of the ACM Grace Murray Hopper Award for contributions to radiance field representations, 3D scene capture and rendering, and pioneering neural implicit representations and 3D generative AI.

Mildenhall and Srinivasan’s research fundamentally transformed computer graphics and vision by introducing Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF), a breakthrough that replaced decades of reliance on explicit geometric representations with differentiable neural scene representations. This paradigm shift not only achieved unprecedented realism in rendering novel views, but also established the broader framework of neural fields, now widely adopted across scientific domains including medical imaging, astronomy, and computational physics.

Their contributions underpin widely deployed systems in major products including immersive mapping, 3D commerce, and large-scale scene visualization, and have been adopted across leading technology companies. By bridging neural rendering and generative modeling, they have driven the emergence of 3D-aware AI systems and opened a rich frontier that will shape research and applications for years to come.

2021 ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award

Manish Raghavan is the recipient of the 2021 ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award for his dissertation "The Societal Impacts of Algorithmic Decision-Making." Raghavan’s dissertation makes significant contributions to the understanding of algorithmic decision making and its societal implications, including foundational results on issues of algorithmic bias and fairness.

Algorithmic fairness is an area within AI that has generated a great deal of public and media interest. Despite being at a very early stage of his career, Raghavan has been one of the leading figures shaping the direction and focus of this line of research.

Raghavan is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Harvard Center for Research on Computation and Society. His primary interests lie in the application of computational techniques to domains of social concern, including algorithmic fairness and behavioral economics, with a particular focus on the use of algorithmic tools in the hiring pipeline. Raghavan received a BS degree in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from the University of California, Berkeley, and MS and PhD degrees in Computer Science from Cornell University.

Honorable Mentions for the 2021 ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award go to Dimitris Tsipras of Stanford University, Pratul Srinivasan of Google Research and Benjamin Mildenhall of Google Research.

Dimitris Tsipras’ dissertation, “Learning Through the Lens of Robustness,” was recognized for foundational contributions to the study of adversarially robust machine learning (ML) and building effective tools for training reliable machine learning models. Tsipras made several pathbreaking contributions to one of the biggest challenges in ML today: making ML truly ready for real-world deployment.

Tsipras is a Postdoctoral Scholar at Stanford University. His research is focused on understanding and improving the reliability of machine learning systems when faced with the real world. Tsipras received a Diploma in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the National Technical University of Athens, as well as SM and PhD degrees in computer science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

Pratul Srinivasan and Benjamin Mildenhall are awarded Honorable Mentions for their co-invention of the Neural Radiance Field (NeRF) representation, associated algorithms and theory, and their successful application to the view synthesis problem. Srinivasan’s dissertation, "Scene Representations for View Synthesis with Deep Learning," and Mildenhall’s dissertation, “Neural Scene Representations for View Synthesis,” addressed a long-standing open problem in computer vision and computer graphics. That problem, called “view synthesis” in vision and “unstructured light field rendering” in graphics, involves taking just a handful of photographs of a scene and predicting new images from any intermediate viewpoint. NeRF has already inspired a remarkable volume of follow-on research, and the associated publications have received some of the fastest rates of citation in computer graphics literature—hundreds in the first year of post-publication.

Srinivasan is a Research Scientist at Google Research, where he focuses on problems at the intersection of computer vision, computer graphics, and machine learning. He received a BSE degree in Biomedical Engineering and BA in Computer Science from Duke University and a PhD in Computer Science from the University of California, Berkeley.

Mildenhall is a Research Scientist at Google Research, where he works on problems in computer vision and graphics. He received a BS degree in Computer Science and Mathematics from Stanford University and a PhD in Computer Science from the University of California, Berkeley.