[1] In 1998, he received the ACM SIGGRAPH CG Achievement Award for his work in developing radiosity methods for realistic image synthesis.

[4] Cohen attended Beloit College for his undergraduate degree, graduating with a BA in 1976 in art and Rutgers University with a BS in civil engineering in 1983.

His most significant results included the hemicube (1985),[6] for computing form factors in the presence of occlusion; an experimental evaluation framework (1986), one of the first studies to quantitatively compare real and synthetic imagery; extending radiosity to non-diffuse environments (1986); integrating ray tracing with radiosity (1987); progressive refinement (1988), to make interactive rendering possible.

In a very different research area, Cohen made significant contributions to motion simulation and editing, most significantly: dynamic simulation with kinematic constraints (1987), which for the first time allowed animators to combine kinematic and dynamic specifications; interactive spacetime control for animation (1992), which combined physically based and user-defined constraints for controlling motion.

In addition, at Microsoft Research, in his groundbreaking and most-cited work, Cohen and colleagues introduced the Lumigraph (1996),[7] a method for capturing and representing the complete appearance—from all points of view—of either a synthetic or real-world object or scene.

In subsequent work, Cohen significantly advanced the state of the art in matting & compositing, with papers on image and video segmentation based on anisotropic kernel mean-shift (2004); video cutout (2004), which preserved smoothness across space and time; optimized color sampling (2005), which improved previous approaches to image matting by analyzing the confidence of foreground and background color samples; and soft scissors (2007), the first interactive tool for high-quality image matting and compositing.