Chair’s Corner

Dear ACM SIGGRAPH Community,

TL;DR – Vote by August 11. We are making data-driven changes to our conferences—please fill out your surveys so we have the feedback we need. We’re also forming an Industry Relations Advisory Board, welcoming four new Chapters, and looking for volunteers to help shape our future.

I’m writing this one week before SIGGRAPH in Los Angeles. It’s coming a bit early this year due to preparations for the 2028 Olympics at the LA Convention Center, and we also believe attendance will be impacted due to increased travel costs, concerns over international travel to the US, economic factors, and, as you’ll see below, a likely need to adjust.

You’ll see in the updates below that we’re doing a number of things to address this. While the conferences are largely controlled by the Conference Advisory Group (CAG) and the SIGGRAPH Asia Conference Advisory Group (SACAG), the Executive Committee is responsible for the ongoing sustainability and growth of our community, with the conferences being the primary driver of our survival.

Thank you to those who volunteered for our vacated Executive Director position. For vacated positions, the EC appoints a new person to fi ll the role, and I couldn’t be happier that Chris Bregler accepted the EC’s request to serve our community. He will fi ll the position through August 2027, at which point a newly elected Director will replace him. Speaking of Director elections, we have some exceptional candidates for the three Director positions that are being vacated this August. Please vote before 11 August!

We held our third full-weekend EC meeting at the beginning of June, virtually to reduce costs. Please see the full Executive Committee meeting notes for all the details, but I’ll summarize below.

Financial Solvency

A key part of our organization’s long-term survival is financial solvency. ACM SIGGRAPH has a healthy reserve fund balance of around $8M. That seems like a lot, right? However, taking into account the required reserve levels set by ACM and SIGGRAPH to prevent intervention, we have only $2.3M in surplus.

And while $2.3 M is still a lot, when the conference itself costs between $6-$8M to produce, and the likely revenue is only known 1-2 months out from the conference, when it’s too late to adjust contracts, it is easy to see quickly that the gap can disappear. A single conference can and has lost over $1M in the past! Three of those, and the community loses control of the organization. This is why we have focused so much on Los Angeles and Vancouver in recent history as the two locations that have typically delivered the necessary return. But with last year and this year’s anticipated outcomes, even that isn’t enough.

As an Executive Committee, we are working hard to establish the right balance between oversight and granting independence, allowing the CAG and Conference leaders to make responsible decisions. And we are attempting to do this through as many indicative data points as we can gather. Session attendance, pre-attendance (new) and post-attendance surveys, relative costs per program or experience, and more all go into that oversight structure, which we will work to fi nalize during an all-day session at the conference itself. I truly believe we can actually make a better conference experience with less money by reassessing the value of our expenses. We need data to drive those decisions and validate them in the future, and that is data we intend to share with you all. Please help us by completing any surveys you receive so we can truly take our community’s voices into consideration.

Industry Relations

Industry is instrumental in this financial solvency. Not just for a conference, but for all our conferences and year-round member benefits as well. To that end, we have approved the formation of an Industry Relations Advisory Board (IRAB) with a chair to be appointed by SIGGRAPH. Please see section 6.7 of our Guidelines for more details on its mission, though their activities will be defined between now and end of the year and through participation with representatives from industry as well.

Without the ability to effect change, these efforts would have limited value, but the ability to effect too much change threatens both the CAG and the core of a lauded, peer-reviewed technical conference. That balance will be critical to get right. The initial step in that control is to incorporate the External Relations Committee’s activities into this new Advisory Board. Thank you to Miho Aoki for her efforts during her term, which ends in September.

Officer Term by Law Change

Mentioning again, as I see this as a critical change for the future of this organization. On your ballot you will see a by-laws proposal change to return to our starting point and to match the election cycle of every other SIG. I implore you to consider voting “yes” to allow our membership to select the Chair and Vice-Chair roles, not just the Executive Committee, and to restore their terms to three years. If passed, this would go into place after both the Chair Elect, June Kim, and I have completed our one-year tenures, so this isn’t self-serving!

While I am proud of what we have accomplished in the past year as Chair, it was nowhere near the time required to achieve what is needed. As you can see above, many initiatives are just starting and need continual focus to conclude, and non-profit, volunteer-run organizations need time to change course. That course needs to be set by consistent leadership.

Member Benefits and Chapters

We have made some, but not nearly enough, progress on giving greater year-round benefi ts to our members. More will happen over the next year, especially if we can adjust the conference to return funding to the organization as intended for such activities. However, while the organization itself can do more, I wanted to highlight what an important role Chapters play in our year-round efforts. Student and professional chapters are our best port of call for engagement because they are local to communities. The community and connection created by our conferences is as important as the material and learnings being shared at them. Chapters are an extension of that. I was lucky enough to meet with the SIGGRAPH Sydney Chapter since the last Chair’s Corner and heard about the activities that they have planned, the local struggles that their chapter membership faces, and what we can do as an organization to help them.

I truly believe that Chapters are the lifeblood of our community, which makes me so excited to share that four new chapters have been established since my last post, bringing us to 60 total: Manila, Calgary, SRMIST, and NMSU!

Volunteerism

Thank you again for the opportunity to serve our community. There will likely be just one or two more posts before term, as your Chair is complete, but it’s been an honor to contribute back to an organization that has given me so much. If you need a bit of inspiration about the value of serving your community, or just a few chuckles at my expense, please watch this keynote I gave at the co-located ASWF Open Source Days at SIGGRAPH in 2024. And if it helps inspire you, there is a link on this page to get you started or if you are attending the conference, please consider visiting SIGGRAPH 365 in the SIGGRAPH Village at the conference to learn more!

We need lots of help and fresh perspectives on what our future holds.

Sincerely,
Darin Grant
ACM SIGGRAPH Executive Committee Chair (1 Sept 2025 – 30 August 2026)

Dear ACM SIGGRAPH Community,

There has been a surprisingly large amount of activity since my last update in January. From the resignation of one of your elected Executive Committee members to a constructive full weekend Executive Committee meeting in Santa Clara, there is a lot to discuss!

Pathways to Meaningful Reform

Immediately following the 10 February 2026 EC Committee meeting (minutes available here), we received an email from Hugues Hoppe resigning from his post. He has chosen to publish this publicly on his personal blog here. I have a great amount of respect for Hugues’ contributions to our industry and do not wish to engage in public debate of his assessment. However, I disagree with his opinion that there is “no path forward toward meaningful reform.”

Non-profit organizations are intentionally bureaucratic, and ACM SIGGRAPH is no exception. Changes to the operations of these organizations can take time and, while some changes require membership voting (see “Officer Terms” below), the changes Hugues discussed regarding the organization’s expense allocation do not. And, in particular, the changes made to the conference budget are primarily the responsibility of the Conference Advisory Group (CAG). The CAG is composed of former and future Conference Chairs, representatives of the EC, and appointed members of the community (including Sylvain Paris!) to ensure consistency and informed decision-making as a part of their remit. The CAG provides this support in two major ways:

1. Conference Chair onboarding. We have a new Conference Chair each year, and an advisory board that can provide guidance on “how it’s done,” which helps prevent large-scale changes that could jeopardize the conference.
2. Executive Committee balance. While the EC ultimately has fiscal responsibility for the organization, the rotating set of elected volunteers often lacks the time to focus on specific Conference issues and direct Conference Chair experience (though our current EC is blessed to have six previous SIGGRAPH and SIGGRAPH Asia Chairs among its ranks).
   

The CAG thus ensures consistency in a rotating volunteer-led conference. And while consistency is good, it can make it difficult to make dramatic changes to the conference due to the natural inertia of legacy. This is exactly why the charts shared by my predecessor show an increase in programs despite decreases in attendance and exhibitors.

Since joining the EC 1.5 years ago, we have been focused on reducing costs. The SIGGRAPH Conference has lost money for the last two years, and the EC has aggressively looked to reduce the loss to the overall organization through two efforts. First, we have reduced our budget by over 30% outside of the conference across all non-conference-related costs. Second, despite being hosted in Los Angeles this year, we have required the CAG to produce a conference budget assuming significantly less income. Those immediate adjustments have given us the best chance to stop loss as well as giving headroom to re-add last-minute items to the conference (like coffee breaks) should things go better than anticipated.

And while those adjustments are immediate, there are greater ones to make. The single best way to shift conference expenses to the areas Hugues was interested in is to reduce the number of programs. Each program has operational, logistical, and administrative costs for the conference that require additional volunteers, equipment, or space, as well as additional contractor spend. Understanding roughly how expenses break down across programs was a focus of our November EC meeting, and combined with approaches to understand the value of those programs to our attendees, was a focus of our recent EC meeting. The combination of these two signals will provide clear, data-driven targets for program reduction going forward, which should allow us to reduce the operational spend on our contractors to match their reduced scope.

That’s a long way of saying: we have made progress to the point that we are confident we have stopped tapping our organization’s reserve, and we are positioned to look at more targeted adjustments to the conference to improve the attendee experience after this year’s conference in July.

Call for Appointed EC Director

With Hugues’ departure, we have a position to fill until the end of his term in August of 2027. Unlike the other roles we will advertise and vote on for a three-year term this summer, this role is appointed by the EC. However, we would like your help. We would prefer to have someone from the research community fill Hugues’ term, as the EC purposefully selects candidates from all parts of our community (research, practitioners, arts, and education). While we have a number of amazing researchers on the EC now, this role was intentionally geared toward our core research community. If you are a researcher interested in filling out an 18-month term on the EC, please email me at ec-chair@siggraph.org.

Industry Relations

A key factor in the health of our conference is its topicality and industry relevance. While the conference has long benefited from the rise of computer graphics in media and entertainment, it is clear that the future of our conference requires a focus well beyond Hollywood. The biggest industry partners are focused on the broader topic of visual computing applied to both digital and physical worlds. Overwhelmingly, a key factor for our industry partners has been a lack of consistency over years, conferences, and the various organization entry points in establishing long-term partnerships. While we have just scratched the surface here, there is a clear need for a consistent Industry Relationship component at the organizational level to enable a consistent, multi-conference partnership.

Member Benefits

As mentioned, our other focus for our onsite meeting was on Member Benefits. This is a long-standing and, with a rotating EC membership, a semi-annual discussion point. Ultimately, this starts with identifying who we are and what our values are. While this may feel redundant with our charter, the fact that our charter is focused on CG&IT reflects its age. The EC spent a significant amount of time discussing and debating how we should identify our organization and, by extension, our membership. Establishing this basis was helpful in determining who and what we should focus on for our members.

We would like to increase the value of and increase the number of members in SIGGRAPH. Most of us are members because of the discount we receive on conference attendance. But to grow our membership, we need to go beyond that. We have until our next in-person meeting to establish those targets.

Officer Terms

One last thing. When you get your ballots this summer to vote for new EC Directors, you will see a bylaws change to approve as well. A number of years ago, we changed from a three-year term as President of ACM SIGGRAPH to an annually rotating Chair of the Executive Committee as determined by the EC Directors. The reasoning was clear: at the time, the EC’s work was very top-heavy toward the President, and it was hard to convince people to do it for three years. Having experienced the role as Chair Elect and now Chair, and having spoken with every past EC Chair since the change, as well as other SIG Leaders and ACM, I believe the noble experiment did not achieve its goal.

Much like the Conference Chair described above, this role requires extensive onboarding. “I was finally fi guring the role out by the time I exited it” was the phrase that I heard repeated by past chairs. Given that, you will see a bylaws change to establish an EC Director position specifically for the three officer roles in the future: Chair, Vice-Chair, and Treasurer. I believe it is important that these roles are specifically elected (not all people who are great for the Executive Committee would be great Officers) and that they are multi-year, allowing folks enough time to make meaningful reform.

Sincerely,
Darin Grant
ACM SIGGRAPH Executive Committee Chair (1 Sept 2025 – 30 August 2026)

Dear ACM SIGGRAPH Community,

It has been a while since my last post, as we have been extremely busy on the SIGGRAPH Executive Committee. 

General Updates

First, I want to take this opportunity to also welcome our new Conference Advisory Group Chair, Erik Brunvand.  This appointed position is a significant commitment, as the CAG Chair is responsible for leading the team that ensures the success of our annual SIGGRAPH conference.  Which leads me to express my sincere gratitude to our outgoing CAG Chair, Mikki Rose. Mikki has been a member of the CAG for NINE years: the first three leading to her role as Conference Chair in 2019, and the last six years as Chair of the CAG.  Mikki exemplifies the level of commitment we are fortunate to have within our community, and we are fortunate to have had her service.

Following my last post on SIGGRAPH Asia’s 2026 location, I wanted to summarize the final steps we have taken based on feedback from our entire community.

1. We will be surveying our attendees about future conference locations.  We will use this as an early indicator for our attendees, not only of interest but also of potential concerns about locations.
2. We will share answers to the accessibility questions we solicited regarding transparency in future site selection.  While there will always be trade-offs in our location choices, we believe this transparency was a key gap in our process, and we are committed to providing it going forward.
3. We will not apply these guidelines to our specialized conferences.  We provide minimal oversight of these conferences, allowing them to operate in ways that best serve their respective parts of our larger community.  That said, all Specialized Conferences follow ACM guidelines and enforced by our Standing Committee Chair and liaisons to our Executive Committee.

November Executive Committee

Since my last post, we have held an intense and successful Executive Committee meeting (see below) and an incredibly successful SIGGRAPH Asia in Hong Kong, with over 6,000 attendees.  Congratulations to SIGGRAPH Asia 2025’s conference leadership on an excellent experience!

We hosted this EC meeting in Chicago and at the Smithbucklin Offices to reduce our costs.  I am very thankful to SB for hosting us.  As mentioned, we accomplished a lot in two days of being locked in a conference room.  It was a reminder of how valuable in-person experiences are for building community and why improving our site selection process is so important. Ensuring this community remains connected through our annual in-person conferences is essential to our organization’s health.

Details of our efforts are in our meeting notes, but I’ll summarize that our work was really divided into two main themes for the weekend:

1. Mission.  What is the mission of the EC, the Conference Advisory Groups, and the right levels of oversight for each?  We’ve confirmed that the EC’s priorities are to provide benefits to the membership year-round and to ensure the organization’s long-term sustainability.
2. Organizational Sustainability.  Our organization depends on financial solvency and volunteership.  Ensuring both were the focus of discussions ranging from the roles of Standing Committees, Advisory Boards, and Affinity Groups to multi-year expense control and revenue growth opportunities, to the officer structure for our organization.

This team of elected and appointed Executive Committee members has committed to doing the work to make us better, and you should expect to see some key changes before the end of my (too short) one-year term as the Chair of the organization.

Member Benefits

Since my last post, there has been some discontent raised around member benefits and accessibility under ACM Open.  ACM Open has been discussed for quite some time as an exciting step toward making our community’s work more accessible. Years of planning and effort culminated in a launch on January 1st, much to the excitement of our community.  Unfortunately, unexpected changes led to both private and public calls for change.  I’m grateful that ACM listened to this feedback and made immediate corrections, ensuring that, by providing open access to all content, our paying membership was not disadvantaged.

You’ll note that member benefits are a key responsibility of the Executive Committee, but we had limited discussion of them in our last in-person meeting.  What the organization can do to deliver greater value to our membership will be a primary focus of our meeting at the beginning of March. If you have suggestions, please feel free to share them with me at ec-chair@siggraph.org.

Speaking of our membership at large, I was fortunate to meet Ana and Felipe, the Chair and Vice Chair of our SIGGRAPH Bogota Chapter, while on vacation over the holidays.  They gave me a valuable perspective that I lacked on what it’s like to be part of this community while so far away from our conference locations and centers of leadership.  This, combined with meeting and speaking with many Asian Chapter leaders who attended SIGGRAPH Asia in Hong Kong, was a powerful reminder of the importance of our local chapters and further motivated me to focus on member benefits at the Executive Committee level.  I am looking forward to sharing our commitments in my next update.

Sincerely,

Darin Grant

ACM SIGGRAPH Executive Committee Chair (1 Sept 2025 – 30 August 2026)

Dear ACM SIGGRAPH Community,

It is with immense excitement and a deep sense of responsibility that I embrace the role of Executive Committee (EC) Chair for ACM SIGGRAPH. I am honored to lead this incredible community that I have been an active participant in for almost 30 years until my term as Chair ends 30 August, 2026 when our newly confirmed Chair-Elect, June Kim, will be taking over.

As I step into this position, I want to express my sincere gratitude to our outgoing Chair, Eakta Jain, for her dedicated leadership. I also extend my heartfelt thanks to the Executive Committee members who concluded their service this year, including Mona Kasra, Shimin Hu. and our dedicated Treasurer, Brad Lawrence, for their invaluable contributions to our organization. Their hard work has laid a foundation upon which we will continue to build.

I also recognize that I am entering a situation that requires immediate action to repair broken trust within our community. The Chair’s Corner is focused on a key example of that break in trust:  our handling of the dissent by members of our community in the choice of Kuala Lumpur for SIGGRAPH Asia 2026.

In December 2024, the site selection for the SIGGRAPH Asia 2026 conference was brought to the Executive Committee as an urgent matter to be resolved in the meeting.  We saw a brief presentation of the options with the recommendation by the SIGGRAPH Asia Conference Advisory Group (SACAG) for Kuala Lumpur as the location.  The vote was taken virtually due to time constraints in the EC meeting.  This is reflected in our public minutes of that meeting.

From then on, there was limited communication from the EC on the matter.  This was because, after learning of the concerns from the community, the EC was divided on how to respond. In hindsight, the choice not to respond at all in the face of a divided team was incorrect.

In the virtual Townhall held on 15 Sept after SIGGRAPH, this issue was discussed, along with a request to “release the May minutes!”.  That demand led us to realize that our EC meeting minutes had not been published since May due to a clerical error, which has now been addressed here.

That has led to two other actions:

• Summary of the EC’s deliberations regarding SIGGRAPH Asia. The public minutes do not indicate what we discussed and I have gotten permission from the EC members at that time to publish this overview of what happened “behind closed (virtual) doors”.
• Fulsome, public minutes published.  We have ended the practice of public and private minutes and will be publishing detailed discussions under Chatham House Rule.  You should see the difference starting with the minutes that have already been published during my term.  This practice will also guide our personal conversations as EC members to ensure we can engage freely with our colleagues and the community at large.

However, those efforts toward transparency are not enough.  We got into this situation because the decision was rushed and lacked specific guidance on how to make it.  With a third of the EC entering each year and an annually rotating Chair, clear programs of necessary activities and decision-making are essential to keep us running efficiently.

To that end, a key focus of my term as Chair is to create a comprehensive project plan, complete with lead times and preparation steps for all major decisions. This plan will be made publicly accessible, outlining the necessary inputs and timelines to ensure thoughtful consideration and avoid hasty actions. This proactive planning is essential to improving our effectiveness and ensuring decisions are not made under undue pressure.

Specifically, guidelines for conference site selection will be created, and details of each selected location with regard to those guidelines shall be made public.  There will always be trade-offs made in selecting the sites for our future conferences but awareness of those trade-offs should be a key part of sharing our decision with the community.  I would like to finalize these guidelines soon but have not received significant engagement from the community on them.  Thus, I am re-sharing the site selection guidelines here with a request to provide comments and suggestions by 31 Oct.  

Finally, I want to address our LGBTQ+ community.  I want to assure you that we celebrate and value the LGBTQ+ as part of the SIGGRAPH community, and you deserve to participate safely in our events without fear.

In discussions about our selection of Kuala Lumpur for SIGGRAPH Asia 2026, I used the term “feel unsafe” instead of “unsafe” to emphasize that your feelings about a location’s safety are more important than any specific law or advisory.  There are travel advisories advising against travel to Malaysia as well as those that state exercising normal caution. What ultimately matters most is your personal sense of safety.  There are clear laws that criminalize same-sex relations in Malaysia, while we have reliable reports of thriving LGBTQ+ communities within the country.  As such, I don’t think there is a clear line for safe or unsafe, except for how you feel.  That is what I meant by adding “feel” to my language, and I apologize for my wording and the harmful impact it had.

Further, I will say that if I were a transgender individual outside of Malaysia, and looking at the evidence, personally, I would not feel safe traveling to the conference.  That’s why I am thankful that our community has pulled together to identify alternative ways to participate in this and future SIGGRAPH and SIGGRAPH Asia conferences.

There is a lot more to come, but that is more than enough for a single update.  I truly look forward to connecting with everyone more directly and openly. Please feel free to message ec-chair@siggraph.org to reach both me and June Kim, our Chair-Elect, who will take over in less than a year. If you’d prefer to message me directly, darin_grant@siggraph.org also works. I thank those of you who have already reached out and participated in constructive dialogue.  Together, we can foster a more transparent, responsive, and trustworthy ACM SIGGRAPH.

Sincerely,

Darin Grant

ACM SIGGRAPH Executive Committee Chair (1 Sept 2025 – 30 August 2026)