Chair’s Corner

One of the most frequent criticisms I hear about SIGGRAPH is that the organization is opaque or, equivalently, I hear about a lack of transparency. To the extent that this critique is fair, it is not due to a desire for secrecy (there are only a handful of things that are confidential), instead, it is because of the difficulty of communicating all that an organization like SIGGRAPH is doing. We have 21 standing committees, 6 advisory groups, and 5 strategy teams; we have a complex relationship with ACM, which is also a complex organization. It took a full year on the Executive Committee (EC) to begin to understand how SIGGRAPH works and after 5 years, 1000s of hours of work, and even a year as chair, there is still plenty I do not know. There are at least a thousand, probably more like five thousand, human hours that go into every week. It would be impossible for anyone to deeply understand everything that SIGGRAPH is doing. So it is an issue of scale, not secrecy. In fact, one of the reasons I am writing these essays is to improve communication with our members.

For those with an interest in long reading, we do maintain documentation of the most significant achievements, meetings, and policies:

– SIGGRAPH files an annual report for ACM every year, and you can look all the way back to 2001 here. While I have not filed one myself yet, I am told by my predecessor that it is surprising just how much work the organization does.

– All of our official meeting minutes are kept here. These are generally pretty boring, but boring is what transparency means. Personally, I have found a few things from the minutes before my time interesting; I am not the first person to bring up a papers-only registration.

– We keep our policies and procedures updated here. We update them every few months as we strive to achieve the best governance of our organization (the governance committee meets every other week to discuss updates, which accounts for about 10 of those human hours per week). Importantly, we document the rationale for our procedures and policies, so that the next generation of leaders knows not just how we do things, but why.

But one area we are a bit opaque is the financials, again that is simply because things are complex enough that it is difficult to explain.  So, in an effort to increase transparency, I will try to explain how SIGGRAPH’s finances work.

First, we are a Special Interest Group (SIG) under the ACM umbrella, which means we inherit ACM’s not-for-profit (501(c)(3) under US tax law) status. This status is actually different from a “non-profit.” Significantly, it allows us (and ACM) to have paid staff and has less stringent financial reporting requirements; there are other differences as well.

Under ACM policies we are required to have a reserve fund, which is basically a bank account, held and managed by ACM, that has enough money should we encounter really bad times (e.g. a pandemic or global financial crisis). The reserve fund requirement is based on a percentage of expenditures and, before the pandemic, SIGGRAPH was required to keep about $4M in the bank. Going below the reserve fund is a big no-no and results in unpleasant oversight. I’ve heard horror stories of the times it has happened before (after financial crises in the early and late 2000s). So, we mandated a cushion (in the policies noted above we are required to have an extra $1M in 2018 dollars) so that it would not happen again. SIGGRAPH had been so successful over the last decade that we actually had a $3M cushion and were planning to re-invest that money in the community with initiatives like student travel grants and other things before the pandemic. I’ll keep my fingers crossed; we lost about $850K last year and are budgeted to lose $675K this year (our fiscal year starts July 1), so half our cushion will be gone by the SIGGRAPH 2022 conference.

SIGGRAPH (and all the SIGs) pay overhead (formerly called allocation) to ACM. Overhead is charged based on total expenditures, which matches most University models I know of. One wrinkle is that the overhead is on a sliding scale. SIGGRAPH pays more overhead on its first $10K than on its last $1M. This approach makes sense since our need for ACM services does not scale linearly with our spending and, in fact, ACM cannot provide many of the professional services SIGGRAPH requires so we must rely on contracts for professional services (e.g. Conference Management and Administration).

Conferences create their own budgets. Whether it is SIGGRAPH or HPG, the conference leadership comes up with registration fees and determines how to spend that revenue. They do include ACM’s overhead charge in their budgets, albeit at different percentages. The SIGGRAPH conference’s budget must be approved by the Executive Committee, but the conference chair puts together the budget with input from the Conference Advisory Group (CAG), which contains several members from the EC, and members from the conference management team. The SIGGRAPH conference budget before the pandemic was about $7M (about $8.5M for SIGGRAPH 2019) and dwarfs everything else SIGGRAPH does. The year before the pandemic (July 2019 – June 2020) our total expenses for the entire SIGGRAPH organization were $9.8M, the year before that it was closer to $8M. SIGGRAPH Asia is handled quite differently and is more analogous to a licensing agreement, SIGGRAPH has no financial liability and receives a set fee plus a percentage of the expenses over a threshold; the EC does not approve or have access to a detailed SIGGRAPH Asia budget.

Okay, now that your eyes have glazed over or you have fallen asleep, what does SIGGRAPH’s budget actually look like? I will answer that in two parts: before the pandemic and after.

Long ago, I am told, the organization budget was entirely supported by conference returns. There was no digital library, and we actually lost money on membership (because we printed and shipped magazines). But, in recent years, the organization revenue was roughly 1/3 membership dues, 1/3 digital library revenue, and 1/3 conference returns; the budget was in the $1M—1.5M range, with roughly $500K of that going to ACM in overhead. See here for a bit more detail, but note this data does not provide a complete picture; we were operating at a surplus before the pandemic because our conferences were more successful than expected. Aside from ACM overhead, we mostly spent money on travel costs, professional support, and initiatives at our major conferences. Most of the travel costs were for people to attend conferences, either to work as a volunteer or as volunteer recognition for work over the course of the year. While I have had a few manhattan’s on SIGGRAPH’s tab, I have not seen any malfeasance and I doubt it occurs.

Over the last year, of course, our travel costs have gone to zero. Our main costs are for zoom lines and administrative support. At the same time though, we are generating very little revenue. Membership is down and our major conferences are losing money, only the digital library is mostly holding steady. We still have a cushion on the reserve fund balance, but a very bad SIGGRAPH 2022 could knock us below.

In terms of the conference, the vast majority of the registration and exhibitor revenue goes into putting on the conference. The conference is supposed to make a prescribed transfer to the reserve fund and budget for the ACM overhead, both to support the organization and protect against future losses, but it is not supposed to make money (we are a not-for-profit after all). However, putting on a highly professional conference is an expensive endeavor. We rent very high-end A/V equipment and we try to find nice venues for our reception and sometimes our premier events like the Electronic Theater are off-site. We also contract for professional staff to ensure everything goes smoothly. Next time you pick up your reviewer mug, look around at all the people working long days to make sure things run smoothly. Or the next time you give a talk think about the fact that there is at least one A/V expert in the room should something go wrong. All these expenses add up, which is really the answer to the question I often get, “why is SIGGRAPH so expensive?”

In recent years, SIGGRAPH revenue routinely exceeded the expenses and the reserve fund grew too large, $2M above our policy. So, we started to reinvest this money in the organization and conference to create new programs and initiatives, like the Frontiers Talks and Workshops, the Doctoral Consortium, the Diversity and Inclusion Summit, and the Production Gallery (including that wonderful Syd Mead exhibit in 2018). We also support various CRA and ACM initiatives like the CRA-W grad cohort workshop. We had set up a student travel grant program to kickoff for SIGGRAPH 2020. But, travel grants don’t make sense in a pandemic.

In the last two years, we have lost a lot of money, roughly $1.5M by the time our budget cycle ends in June 2022. Unlike a lot of our specialized conferences and our friends with less complex conferences, SIGGRAPH has multi-year contracts for (and reliance on) management and administration professionals to create a professional, polished experience. The planning for the SIGGRAPH conference begins several years in advance; the CAG will be interviewing candidates for the 2024 conference chair this fall, in a normal year, the city would already have been chosen. The SIGGRAPH ship cannot turn on a dime. We can eliminate travel (that is easy in a pandemic), but we still need help to organize the hundreds of overlapping sessions that have very different needs. The fact that our contractors remain hidden in the background is a testament to their professionalism, but I assure you, especially for these virtual events, there has been an enormous amount of work going on behind the scenes.

We hope that next year will be better and we are looking for new ways to generate revenue, including tiered membership. (It turns out that not-for-profits cannot make money selling t-shirts, but we can have a $150 membership that includes a t-shirt—the beauties of tax law.) I will take this opportunity to ask you to become a SIGGRAPH member. SIGGRAPH is, at its heart, a membership organization. Please join us and help support all that we do. And volunteer too!

I hope you enjoy this year’s virtual conference and I look forward to seeing you in person or virtually for a hybrid conference in Vancouver.

—Adam

Howdy.

I wrote last month about a proposal for a new Conference Papers program. Over the last month we conducted a survey of the technical papers community (if you want to participate the survey is here: https://forms.gle/ZKe2jen24yEg57C87).

I have been tracking the results since the survey went live and they have been pretty stable. It is clear that 2/3 of respondents want a Conference Papers program (with the majority preferring that title). The next step is that an ad hoc committee consisting of members of the SIGGRAPH Executive Committee, the Papers Advisory Group, the Publications Committee, and the Research Career Development Committee will draft a program proposal. That proposal will need approval from the above bodies as well as the Conference Advisory Group and the SIGGRAPH Asia Conference Advisory Group. And, if we establish a relationship with PACM on CGIT, we will need approval from several ACM committees as well.

I want to thank everyone who participated in the survey. This idea has been kicking around for years and it is nice to see some momentum building.

If you want to see the results of the survey they are here:

Howdy,

As far back as I can remember, the SIGGRAPH technical papers community has complained about the technical papers program. As I have gotten older I’ve begun to realize that *every* technical papers community complains about their program, whether it is the review process, acceptance rates, or the additional comparisons required by reviewer #2, etc. It seems just to be human nature. There is almost always a sense that the “grass is greener” and I am often reminded of the Churchill quote: “Democracy is a very bad form of government, but I ask you never to forget: all the others are so much worse.”

But, I do think that something has shifted over the last five years. Page counts and author lists have gotten longer; the number of hours of work to produce a SIGGRAPH Technical Paper is far greater than when I was a grad student. This trend is not, in and of itself, bad and is, in part, due to progress in the field; over the past decades the community has built up an enormous body of prior art for reviewer #2 to point to, and much of that work is available in open-source repositories. A very positive effect is that SIGGRAPH technical papers are highly novel, very rigorous, and contain thorough analysis; I think the quality of our papers rivals the top journals in all of science, as evidenced by the fact that ACM Transactions on Graphics (ToG) has the highest impact factor of any ACM journal that publishes novel research (apparently ACM Computing Surveys scores higher).

But, as with all things, there are downsides. I would argue that the increased amount of work required to go from research results to a paper published at SIGGRAPH has had some significant deleterious consequences.

First, we have shifted somewhat from basic research—gaining insights, running experiments, and solving problems—to extensive evaluation. Extensive evaluation is certainly important. But, I would argue that this is separate from contributions to basic research. In fact, I would argue that authors proposing a new idea are the very worst people to be evaluating that idea; no one is going to spend as much time understanding or tweaking the parameters of others’ methods as they will their own.

Second, the amount of work required to publish means that graphics researchers publish fewer papers, garner fewer citations, and are jumping ship to neighboring conferences that have just as much credibility in a tenure review, but require less work.

Over the years, I have heard many proposals to change the SIGGRAPH process: accept more papers, accept fewer papers, re-impose page limits (granted there was never an official limit, but in 2001 if you went over 8 pages, you must have made a *very* significant contribution; Hertzmann and colleagues “Image Analogies” was a major outlier at the time at 14 pages). But, one idea has recently started gaining traction: introducing conference papers / short papers / technical briefs. There is little consensus on what to call such a program and there are many other details to also figure out.

To be clear, the idea that is building momentum is not to create a “low-bar” SIGGRAPH paper. Whatever form this program would take it would have the same high level of intellectual merit and technical novelty. But, given page limits, papers may, for example, have only a demonstration of an idea, rather than a complete systems with an exhaustive comparison to prior work. As with conferences like CVPR, authors would have to choose which details and evaluations to include; they would be forced to focus on what they consider most important and what will likely benefit future readers. Philosophically, I would argue that in any optimization it is very difficult to find a good solution in the absence of constraints, but that once you start introducing constraints, e.g. page counts, you are forced to make decisions to honor the constraints and quickly converge to a (probably local) minimum.

While the review process would be rigorous and may include a rebuttal, it would not include a second review cycle or mandatory revisions, further reducing the workload for the authors and the committee. The door would remain open for publishing extended versions in a journal, and we may be able to work with the PACM on CGIT to invite papers to submit such versions, perhaps with reviewer continuity.

These are the broad-brush outlines of the sort of program gaining momentum. Let me mention some of the positive and negative potential consequences.

On the positive side, we may stop losing researchers to other communities and bring more researchers into the SIGGRAPH community. Since I joined the EC, I have seen plenty of graphs which show that SIGGRAPH submissions, and in fact all graphics submissions, are basically flat while CHI/CVPR/NeurIPS are skyrocketing. Sure, some of that is simply the fact that Machine Learning is the hottest thing in Computer Science right now, but you can publish Machine Learning papers at SIGGRAPH. More practically, with this new program the community can publish more papers and members of our community will appear stronger on all of the imperfect, but influential, metrics from G-number to publication count; resulting in more funding, more hiring, and more recognition. And, in my role as SIGGRAPH chair, the most important thing is keeping members of the community engaged and sharing their work in our publications.

On the negative side, this may draw some papers away from the regular Technical Papers program. Personally, I think this is okay; the work is still in SIGGRAPH, though in a different program. I think it would be important that authors decide on where to submit; maybe this new program has a deadline two weeks later than Technical Papers and it is disallowed to submit to both.

In my view, the potentially bigger downside is a decrease in submissions to our specialized conferences, which historically have hoped to pick up rejections from SIGGRAPH. One idea I have heard suggested was to allow papers accepted to this new program to give oral presentations at specialized conferences and posters at the SIGGRAPH and SIGGRAPH Asia conferences. Such an approach would presumably provide the specialized conferences with great content. Of course, it is also possible, though maybe counterintuitive, that a such a program would generate *more* submissions to our specialized conferences; while authors may be tempted to send rejected Technical Papers to ToG or hold them for the next upcoming SIGGRAPH or SIGGRAPH Asia, papers rejected from non-journal program may well find their way into the specialized conferences.

Of course, if we implement such a program, there would be all sorts of unintended consequences that we can only guess at now, just as there were when we made the decision in 2002 to include SIGGRAPH and SIGGRAPH Asia papers in special issues of ToG. There are also many questions that need answering before we could move forward, and that is why I am writing this essay, to invite the community to be part of this conversation.If you think this is a great idea, we want to know. If you think this is a terrible idea, we also want to know. If you have ideas on how this broad-brush proposal could be improved or how details could be filled in, we want to hear from you.

In this spirit we will be creating a survey and holding a town hall later this month to get feedback from the community. This page will be updated with more information as it becomes available.

Adam

Howdy,

I am pretty good with words. But, I still cannot find the words to describe how excited I was about SIGGRAPH 2020. It was my 20th SIGGRAPH, I was taking the reins as chair of the organization, and it was going to be in my neighborhood; for the first time ever I would not need to get on a plane to attend. (I guess I still didn’t need to get on a plane to attend 🙂 .) I was even planning to bring my family for a day and show my five year old around the Experience Hall.

Sometime in fall 2019 I bought a bottle of bootjack rye, to bring something local to our annual special session on whisky fluids; it lived in my basement until the unthinkable happened. We all were heartbroken in the spring when we realized we would not be able to get together in person with our best friends and colleagues. I have to give a shout out to Kristy Pron, our 2020 conference chair, and her team for their grace in handling an emerging pandemic, pivoting to a virtual conference in a matter of months. It was a heavy lift for everyone involved, myself included, as every week seemed to bring new uncertainty and no one had a playbook. While it would have been easier to give up and cancel, instead our volunteers and professional partners managed to put together an expansive virtual experience. 

Of course, we did not get everything right and a year+ into the pandemic we all have learned a great deal about virtual experiences. I, and everyone involved in SIGGRAPH, have been listening to feedback from the community. In fact, a big part of my job as chair is listening to folks articulate feedback. Whether that feedback has come through surveys, town halls, the FaceBook, email, or zoom calls; we have been listening. The highest order bit has always seemed to be making connections (“networking” in corporate parlance) and we have a few ideas in this direction.

I am writing now to talk about the things I am excited about for SIGGRAPH 2021, which again will be virtual. A shout out is due for Pol Jeremias, this year’s conference chair, for updating the virtual experience. I expect this to be ++Virtual_SIGGRAPH. (There is an old programming joke about how c++ was updated after it was executed and should have been called ++c.)

First, the content. Even during a pandemic, our community is doing some of the best science I know of. My research group has been reading SIGGRAPH papers for weeks. We cannot wait for the videos to start coming out. One of the upsides to working remotely is that everyone is making videos of their work and another is that there are close to zero travel costs to attend a lab meeting; anyone who wants to present at my lab meeting please feel free to reach out, that probably goes for 1000 other graphics labs across the world.

Second, our amazing new standing committee on research career development (RC⚡DC) is planning to create coffee breaks for folks to get together for informal chats in between conference events. I certainly hope I end up drinking coffee with some of my SIGGRAPH friends, though I may opt for tea.

Third, we will be using the new platform ohyay for some of our events. We experimented with this last fall during a strategy meeting and it was fun. I am forever embarrassed by my score on the SIGGRAPH Jeopardy board, but it was fun to play against our past and past-past president. We are planning to use the platform for different types of social hours every day of the conference.

Fourth, I am super excited that Grant Sanderson is going to speak. He has been on my list of people for a Frontiers talk for years, but because of the pandemic (and maybe my own shyness) I never reached out. But, this year’s team brought him in. I have heard stories of his previous talks and think this is something I would wake up at 5am for, though I do hope it is not at 5am.

Fifth, this year we will be screening short videos for the Technical Papers in “real-time” during the Q&A sessions. This approach has worked very well for our specialized conferences and I expect it will foster more vibrant and robust technical discussions during the virtual papers sessions.

As a bonus, I look forward to other, less formal, social events.  My favorite is whiskey fluids; a small gathering of simulation enthusiasts that started when a bottle of bushmills black-label showed up at a talk I gave in 2006. But I also expect a chapters party, a sake party, and a Pioneers event. Maybe even the mythical tequila lounge will make an appearance (that is just a conjecture, I have heard no rumors).

Cheers everyone and I hope to see you at SIGGRAPH 2021,

Adam

P.S. The advance registration deadline for SIGGRAPH 2021 is June 28th.
P.P.S I have heard rumors of other cool stuff, but nothing I am allowed to write about publicly now.

Howdy,

This is a difficult essay to write. I know people will disagree with me. But, it is an important and timely topic. Issues falling under the “ethics” umbrella seem to be riling computer science more than at any time I can remember. Many of these end up in my inbox.

I don’t like the word “ethics.” It is too broad an umbrella and captures everything from plagiarism, to the potential negative uses of our research, to creating hostile workplaces. So, when someone says “there is an ethical issue,” I have not a clue what they mean. My own model has three “buckets”: publications, harassment and discrimination, and negative impacts of our research. Before I describe these in detail, let me talk about how ethics are handled by SIGGRAPH and ACM.

One of the biggest benefits of being a SIG of ACM is that ACM handles almost all of these issues. They don’t always handle them the way I would like, but they do hire the lawyers, pay for the insurance, setup the review committees, and hire the investigators. It is unimaginable that SIGGRAPH could take these things on. I do wonder if the lack of a parent organization is why some of our neighboring communities are struggling more than SIGGRAPH to deal with some of these issues. At a high level, when a complaint is filed, ACM hires investigators, volunteer committees review the investigation, and potentially a sanction (e.g. you cannot participate in ACM activities for X years) is imposed. This approach borrows some elements from the US criminal justice system: the investigators are analogous to prosecutors and the committees are like juries. But it does leave out an impartial judge or referee to guide the process and to interpret the policies in place at the time of the alleged infraction, which is an important part of the US criminal justice system.

Also of note, thus far ACM has worked hard to keep all allegations and sanctions confidential, though they don’t always succeed. Beyond that, because nothing is public, subcommunities create lists and whisper networks. Clearly this is not an ideal situation. Many professions make allegations and/or sanctions public. This creates the perverse incentive to use the complaint process to avenge some other grievance. Veterinarians live in constant fear that if someone’s beloved pet dies the owner will file a false complaint to the board and, because that complaint becomes public, it may hamper their career. Another analogy would be only showing the one-star reviews for restaurants—only the complaints. Yet another analogy that might hit closer to home is “ratemyprofessor” or reddit. Clearly, this alternative is also not ideal. The ACM council will soon be grappling with these tradeoffs. I do not envy them.

Now let me discuss my buckets:

Publications: This bucket includes academic dishonesty—acts of plagiarism or falsifying results—which humans have been dealing with for hundreds, if not thousands, of years. (The word “plagiarism” dates to the early 17th century, but surely there were earlier cases.) Over the centuries, we have gotten reasonably good at handling most forms of academic dishonesty. ACM handles these complaints for us and they do a good job.

Of course challenges remain; just before drafting this essay, I read this piece about collusion rings. I have heard stories of such behavior within SIGGRAPH before my time, stories of powerful people corrupting the review process for personal gain. But, I think the SIGGRAPH community established norms that made such practices uncommon before my involvement and I have never witnessed any major abuses. However, I am sure there are unconscious biases when a reviewer knows the authors’ names. One strategy we are using to combat this problem is switching almost all of our reviewing to double blind. It is not perfect, but it is a big step forward. I’ll give a shout-out to Olga Sorkine-Hornung for implementing fully double blind review for our main SIGGRAPH conferences; that was a pretty heavy lift. 

A more difficult issue in the publications bucket is inappropriate content or examples. Such standards vary across time, culture, and personal taste. Currently, I would not use the Lena image, a decade ago I would have used it without a second thought. SIGGRAPH is constantly modifying its policies to keep up with the times; our governance committee, which reviews our policies, meets every other week. As an example, five years ago our policies allowed exhibitors to wear only body paint; clearly that was a policy from a different time, and it has been updated.

Harassment and Discrimination: I think of harassment as being overt, usually intentional, actions that make someone else uncomfortable. I think of discrimination as being subtler than outright harassment. It is less overt behavior, but still unacceptable. Sometimes it is intentional, sometimes it is the result of implicit bias, and often it is executed through micro-aggressions. 

Historically, I do not think SIGGRAPH or ACM did a great job with harassment, but we have made strides in recent years. Official policies are now in place and we introduced SIGGRAPH Cares as a first point of contact for victims (ACM also introduced a Cares committee). Both SIGGRAPH and ACM have created committees to support diversity, equity, and inclusion (though ACM leaves out equity). I am also pleased to say that ACM will now allow anonymous harassment complaints, sparing victims the burden of dealing with an investigation. Though this step does have drawbacks: it is very difficult to investigate an anonymous complaint and it is very easy to make a false anonymous complaint as revenge for some other grievance. I am not sure how they plan to handle anonymous complaints.

Spurred by recent events, ACM and SIGGRAPH are doing some deep thinking about discrimination and I do expect some solutions moving forward. SIGGRAPH has an outstanding Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion standing committee, led by Tony Baylis, that is helping all aspects of our organization. One reason that discrimination is tricky is that discrimination, or making decisions, encompasses a large part of what we do as humans: we make judgements on everything from which papers to accept, to whom we choose to hire, to what music we like. You cannot look at a restaurant menu (remember those) without discriminating. It is the basis of that discrimination that is the issue. One small step that we have already taken is that, going forward, all our calls for submissions will include our anti-discrimination policy. Our double-blind review should also help.

Negative Impacts of Our Research: Thus far, the community has left the discussion of this bucket largely to the press, which is probably a mistake. I have heard stories of researchers ambushed or taken out of context by the media and made to seem like evil-doers. SIGGRAPH has run a few workshops on “Truth in Graphics” discussing the implications of some of the work our community does. There was even an effort to codify the acceptable uses of our image and video manipulation technology. Unfortunately, that proved too difficult a task. There have been suggestions for an “ethics” section in papers or on review forms to discuss the potential negative impacts of research, but that idea has not yet gained traction.

I have a few final thoughts.

I think it is extremely dangerous to assess past behavior by current standards. Like the use of the Lena image, policies and rules and culture evolve over time. For most of my life the rule was: don’t date your students, but any legal behavior outside of that relationship is okay. Of course, that approach ignored the incredible power disparities that exist outside a direct teacher-student relationship, and ACM and SIGGRAPH have updated our policies to recognize that behavior in any professional relationship can be inappropriate. Our current rules will likely be modified as time goes on and culture shifts. It is not fair to punish someone who was playing by the rules of the time. Contrariwise, I believe it is right to sanction individuals for violating standards that were in place at the time of an infraction—if I intentionally falsified the results in my thesis, Berkeley should revoke my PhD. Of course, they should not take such action simply because my thesis is obsolete, that is how science evolves. We also should not ignore prior art that includes images or examples that are unacceptable today. The Zimbardo prison experiment could never happen today; it was one of the impetuses for IRBs. But ignoring the results does not make us more ethical. I don’t mean to make light of these issues, but as another analogy, I do hope no one judges me based on my fashion choices in the 80s.

Finally, I want to end on a positive note on an unpleasant topic. Though there are no easy answers, ACM SIGGRAPH is committed to creating a diverse, equitable, and inclusive environment. From how we choose our leaders, to our speakers, to our program committees, we strive to always be welcoming to everyone. And we are making progress. Our DEI committee is doing great work, we created SIGGRAPH cares (we are looking for a new chair, email me if interested), we have explicit policies regarding harassment and discrimination, the community is beginning to think about the potential impacts of our research, and we have had a few test cases regarding inappropriate content. While there has been some inappropriate public shaming, thankfully our community has not devolved into social media flame wars or creating long lists of names that resemble McCarthyism. 

Adam Bargteil

ACM SIGGRAPH Chair