And the Oscar goes to . . .

Scientific and Technical Award (Technical Achievement Award). To Sven Woop and Carsten Benthin for core development, Attila T. Áfra for motion picture feature development, and Manfred Ernst and Ingo Wald for early research and technical direction, of the Intel® Embree Ray Tracing Library. For the past decade, the Intel Embree Ray Tracing Library has provided a high-performance, industry-leading, CPU-based ray-geometry intersection framework through well-engineered open source code, supported by a comprehensive set of research publications. It has become an indispensable resource for motion picture production rendering.

Scientific and Technical Award (Technical Achievement Award). To Attila T. Áfra for the creation of Intel Open Image Denoise, and to Timo Aila for his pioneering work at NVIDIA applying U-Nets to denoising. Open Image Denoise is an open-source library that provides an elegant API and runs on diverse hardware, leading to broad industry adoption. Its core technology is provided by the widely adopted U-Net architecture that improves efficiency and preserves detail, raising the quality of CG imagery across the industry.