News

ACM SIGGRAPH Frontiers Workshops Announced

Jun 26, 2019 | News

Greetings,

We are excited to announce the topics for this years ACM SIGGRAPH Frontiers Workshops:

Computer Graphics for Autonomous Vehicles
Content Generation for Workforce Training
Sim-to-Real: From Skilled Virtual Agents to Real-World Robots
Immersive Visualization
Cybersickness: Causes and Solutions
Textiles: Virtual to Actual

The ACM SIGGRAPH Frontiers Workshops showcase perspectives on emerging and adjacent areas of interest to the SIGGRAPH community. These workshops are full-day explorations into complex new problems, providing a deep-dive for participants into areas like robotics, autonomous vehicles, textiles, assistive and adaptive technology, and manufacturing. All workshops will be held Sunday, 28 July, 9:00 AM – 5:00 PM. Plan to participate and book your flights accordingly.

For more information see https://s2019.siggraph.org/conference/programs-events/organization-events/frontiers-workshops/

See you at the conference!
The ACM SIGGRAPH New Communities Strategy Team

Note: There is no additional charge for registered SIGGRAPH 2019 attendees to attend any of the ACM SIGGRAPH Frontiers Workshops. Lunch will be made available to workshop participants who are interested in additional networking time with other participants (space is limited). A lunch ticket may be purchased for $45 through the online registration system (https://register.rcsreg.com/r2/siggraph2019/). Deadline to secure your lunch is Monday, 8 July.

Sci-Tech Oscar Honors Revolutionary Facial Capture System

Jun 25, 2019 | News

written by Melanie A. Farmer

When Paul Debevec was a post-doc at UC Berkeley in the 1990s, achieving realistic digital human faces was considered a “holy grail” goal in the field of visual effects. This challenge became an area of computer graphics that Debevec and others would work in for the next two decades. Lucky for many moviegoers, they stuck it out: through their revolutionary facial capture methods, memorable characters in such high-grossing films as Avatar and Spider-Man 2 were brought to life on the big screen.

This year, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences awarded Debevec, Tim Hawkins, Wan-Chun Ma, and Xueming Yu with a Technical Achievement Award (a Sci-Tech Oscar) for the invention of the Polarized Spherical Gradient Illumination facial appearance capture method and the design and engineering of the Light Stage X capture system. The innovative system has been used in over 40 feature films, including Maleficent, Furious 7, Oblivion and Blade Runner 2049. It will also contribute to five new movies releasing this year, including Captain Marvel and Shazam.

Indeed, the team’s facial scanning technique coupled with the light stage production system has staked its claim as an industry standard in Hollywood.

“This technology has helped achieve some of the most realistic photoreal digital actors in movies to date,” says Debevec, senior staff engineering at Google VR. “It allows visual effects artists to build a digital character based on the face of the real actor which has all of the same facial shape, appearance, and expressive lines and wrinkles as the animated character. Without this level of detail, the digital actor may not look believable, which would take the audience out of the story.”

Debevec and his team first introduced the new facial capture technique in a paper at the 2007 Eurographics Symposium on Rendering. The team had been working on how to digitize the shape and appearance of a human face down to the level of the person’s skin pores and fine facial creases. Pre-dating the team’s technology, techniques to create digital faces required a lot of time and effort, with low-res results that did not produce realistic details. Debevec and colleagues developed a method to capture natural human faces digitally in a few seconds with their spherical light stage device by shooting a series of photos under special polarized lighting conditions.

“We first put polarizers on all the light stage lights in 2005 to see if we could cancel out the shine of the skin from every lighting direction at the same time,” notes Debevec. “Then, we figured out the gradient illumination patterns to compute surface orientations from the specular reflections the following year. By August 2006, we showed some initial results of the high-res facial scanning to friends at Weta Digital, and within a few weeks they were sending over Sam Worthington and Zoe Saldana, the stars of Avatar, to have their faces scanned with us.”

In addition to feature films, the team’s light stage technology has been used to create digital characters in a variety of video games. At SIGGRAPH 2013’s Real-Time Live, Debevec’s team worked with Activision to demonstrate “Digital Ira”, one of the first photoreal digital characters achieved with real-time rendering. Today, copies of the current USC ICT light stage system have been purchased and installed at both the Activision and Electronic Arts game studios in Los Angeles. And in the team’s highest-profile scanning project, they were invited to build and operate a special light stage scanning system to digitize President Barack Obama in the State Dining Room of The White House in the summer of 2014.

The team’s scanning time is down to just a fraction of a second now.

Debevec, who has been an active ACM SIGGRAPH member for more than 20 years and the recipient of SIGGRAPH’s first Significant New Researcher Award, attended his first SIGGRAPH in 1994 while a summer intern at Paul Allen’s Interval Research Corporation. Debevec published his first SIGGRAPH paper in 1996 on the topic of modeling and rendering architecture from photographs, and went on to use these techniques to direct the Electronic Theater film The Campanile Movie at SIGGRAPH 1997 which helped inspire the “Bullet-Time” shots in The Matrix. “And, I haven’t missed a SIGGRAPH since,” he says.

Debevec and team were presented with their Academy Technical Achievement Award at the Feb. 9, 2019 Sci-Tech awards ceremony held at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel. This marked Debevec’s second Academy Award; in 2010, the Academy presented him and his colleagues with a Scientific and Engineering award for the first generation of the light stage capture system and image-based relighting process used on films such as Spider-Man 2 and the Curious Case of Benjamin Button. “Receiving a second Academy Award is just as exciting as one would hope. The Academy Sci-Tech committee puts an enormous amount of effort into researching and validating which technologies and people should receive awards,” notes Debevec, “and they set a very high bar, so it is very gratifying

2019 Election Results & 2020 Voting

Jun 24, 2019 | News

The three candidates who were voted in as Director At Large for the 2019 elections are listed below.

DIRECTOR A:

Adam Finkelstein,

Princeton, University

DIRECTOR B:

Mona Kasra,

University of Virginia

DIRECTOR C:

Adam Bargteil,

University of Maryland, Baltimore County

The ACM SIGGRAPH election window will open 15 June 2020 to elect three new directors to the ACM SIGGRAPH Executive Committee. In accordance with the bylaws, there will be three races held, all will be Director At Large positions, and one person from each Director position will be elected. Those elected will be starting their terms 1 September 2020.

Members of ACM SIGGRAPH who are in good standing as of 1 June 2020 will be sent voting information in an email message or letter from Election Services Corporation (ESC). To actually cast your vote, follow the link in the email. If ACM does not have an email address on file, members will receive voting information via postal mail. Members also have the option of requesting a paper ballot. If you do not receive an email from ESC, have any questions or would like to request a paper ballot, please email: acmsighelp@electionservicescorp.com or call toll-free 1-866-720-4357.

Call for Participation: HCITISI 2019

Jun 20, 2019 | News

Eighth Argentine Conference on Human-Computer Interaction, Telecommunications, Informatics and Scientific Information (HCITISI 2019)

Córdoba (Huerta Grande), Argentina
November 19 – 22, 2019

Introduction, Program, Cultural Excursions, Topics, Deadlines and Program Committee

1. Introduction and Topics

In this conference we will find the intersection of the formal and factual sciences aimed at human-computer interaction, telecommunications, informatics and scientific information. The goal is to know the latest breakthroughs and the immediate trends, and also in the long term, of each one of the disciplines that make up the sets of the areas of knowledge we approach.

It is also a place of interchange of experiences inside and outside the teaching or educational technological context, without leaving aside the human factors that accompany the evolution of the new technologies and eradicating as much as possible the digital divide phenomenon. In short, to be a kind of vademecum to ponder to the utmost the human and technological available resources, avoiding that they are distorted towards interests totally alien to the national reality.

All contributions –papers, workshops, demos and posters, should be of high quality, originality, clarity, significance and impact. In the current conference it is demonstrated how with a correct integration among professionals of formal and factual sciences interesting research lines in the following subjects: Human-Computer Interaction, Telecommunications, Computer Science, Artificial intelligence, Scientific Information, Journalism: Discursive Analysis, Information and Communication Technologies, Information Society, Research and Development, etc. Consequently, the discussion will be focused on – but not limited to – the following main issues (alphabetical order):

Human-Computer Interaction

:: Communicability and usability engineering
:: Computational folkloristics
:: Computer animation for mixed reality
:: e-Communities managment
:: Emerging and innovative technologies and services for local and international users
:: Human-computer communication
:: Information visualization
:: Interactive information literacy for learning
:: Novel interfaces and cooperative design methods
:: Pervasive computing
:: Quality metrics and evaluation
:: Robotics and machine vision
:: User-centered design
:: Virtual communities for users with special needs

Telecommunications

:: 4G wireless networks and systems
:: Future Internet and next-generation networking architectures
:: Global wireless services
:: Mobile TV and multimedia phone
:: Mobile operating systems
:: Pervasive computing
:: Protocols and standards
:: Satellite and space communications
:: Superconductivity: research and development
:: Wireless and new generation media
:: Wireless for home, local, metropolitan and wide area network
:: Wireless modeling, algorithms and simulation
:: Wireless networking: quality of service, measurement and improvement
:: Wireless telecommunications management

Informatics

:: Computer graphics, image processing and computer vision
:: Cryptography and applied mathematics
:: Data management, exploration and mining
:: e-Learning research methods and models
:: Globalization and ICT
:: Grid, crowd sourcing and cloud computing
:: Hypermedia systems
:: Software and technologies for e-Business
:: Intelligent systems
:: Bio-inspired computing
:: Languages and middleware
:: Natural language processing
:: Parallel and distributed algorithms
:: Semantics, ontologies and metadata
:: Web engineering

Scientific Information

:: Dynamic persuasor versus veracity and free scientific information
:: Ethics and aesthetics of the interactive contents online and off-line
:: Human factors in scientific journalism
:: Information society
:: Intellectual property and copyright
:: Knowledge transfer: university and industry – industry and university
:: Science journalism
:: Scientific communication public, private and hybrid
:: Scientific information for social, rural and industrial development
:: Scientific publications
:: Scientific reputation and public opinion in virtual communities
:: Social communication and concentration of media ownership
:: Social research and the interaction with formal sciences
:: Technological and scientific information through new media

All submitted papers will be reviewed by a double-blind (at least three reviewers), non-blind, and participative peer review. These three kinds of review will support the selection process of those that will be accepted for their presentation at the conference. Authors of accepted papers who registered in the conference can have access to the evaluations and possible feedback provided by the reviewers who recommended the acceptance of their papers, so they can accordingly improve the final version of their papers.

Best regards,

Francisco V. Cipolla Ficarra (Chair – coordinator)
&
Graciela Druetto and Silvia Poncio (Local Secretariat) :: Sonia Flores and Doris Edison (Internacional Secretariatl)

2. Program

Keynote speakers and relator: Silvia Poncio. Interamerican Open University; Rodolfo Sanchéz. Balseiro Institute. National University of Cuyo; José Hamkalo. University of Buenos Aires; Sebastián Gabo. National University of Córdoba; Fabiana Fernández. National University of San Juan, Francisco V. C. Ficarra … to be completed

[ November 19 ]

8:45 – 9:15
Registration

9:15 – 10:00
Bienvenida – Welcome
:::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::
Keynote Relater and Keynote Speaker
:::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::
:: Work in progress …

::: Coffee break: 11:00 – 11:30 :::

:::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::
Papers : 10:45 – 13:15
:::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::
:: Work in progress …

::: 13:15 – 14:15 Lunch

:::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::
Keynote Speaker and Papers : 14:15 – 16:00
:::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::
:: Work in progress …

Coffee break 16:00 – 16:30

:::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::
Papers, Demos and Posters : 16:30 – 19:00
:::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::
:: Work in progress …
::
Excursion # 1: Cultural Heritage –Córdoba City

[ November 20 ]

8:45 – 9:15
Registration and Comments

:::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::
Keynote Speaker and Papers
:::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::
:: Work in progress …

::: Coffee break: 11:00 – 11:30 :::

:::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::
Papers and Demos: 10:45 – 13:15
:::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::
:: Work in progress …

::: 13:15 – 14:15 Lunch

Coffee break 16:00 – 16:30

:::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::
Papers, Demos, Research-in-Proress and Posters : 16:15 – 19:00
:::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::

:: Work in progress …

:: Closing remarks

Excursion # 2: Natural Heritage –Córdoba Province (Punilla Valley)

[ November 21 ]

8:45 – 9:15
Registration and Comments

::: Coffee break: 11:00 – 11:30 :::

::: 13:15 – 14:15 Lunch

Coffee break 16:00 – 16:30

:: Work in progress …

:: Closing remarks

Excursion # 3: Natural and Cultural Heritage (UNESCO) –Córdoba Province

[ November 22 ]

8:45 – 9:15
Comments

Keynote Speaker & Workshops (Courses – English and Spanish ) Free for all participants

Analyzing the “tricking and tampering” of the Human-Computer Interaction in Ibero-America,
Exclusion of Context in American Cultural and Educational Systems,
Horizon 2020: How to Overcome Myths and Legends from the EU,
Neocolonization and University Neomasonry through the Iberian HCI,
Social Networks and the Role of Digital Photography in the Generation of Educational Psychopathies,
Strategies Oriented to the Audit of Interactive Systems,
Usability: Reusability of Expired Concepts in the User Experience in Ibero-America, and
Using New Methodologies and Design Tools in Intelligent Interfaces.
Work in progress …

::: Coffee break: 11:00 – 11:30 :::

:: Work in progress …

Conclusions and final comments.

Third Annual Meeting “Argentina CHI.”

Excursion # 4:Patrimionio Cultural y Natural: Punilla Valley or Córdoba City

Program

Keynote speakers, keynote relator, papers, posters and demos accepted (alphabetical order):

:: Work in progress

4. The events have the following deadlines

Works Submissions: Open. Consequently, as they are received, they will be evaluated. It is a way to speed up the process to make up the final program of the international conference, visa requirements, should plan travel well in advance, etc. In other words, it is not necessary to wait until the deadline to send them for the evaluation process.

Deadline Works Submissions: September, 28th – local time in Hawaiian Islands
Authors Notification: Two weeks after the submission/s
Camera-ready, full papers: October, 31th

Conference: November, 19 and 22. Casa Serrana, Hotels & Resorts. Córdoba (Huerta Grande) – Argentina.

Call for Participation: MSIVISM 2020

Jun 20, 2019 | News

Seventh International Conference on Multimedia, Scientific Information and Visualization for Information Systems and Metrics ( MSIVISM 2020 )

Las Palmas de Gran Canaria – Spain
January 29 – 31, 2020

Topics, Deadlines and Program Committee

1. Topics

Measurement is a fundamental activity in the advancement of the sciences. Historically, civilizations have contributed a myriad of knowledge stemming from the discoveries and inventions of scientists, and in order to perfect such results. the names and studies of those savants are part of the scientific cultural wealth of all humankind; and so they have been carefully recorded in the annuals of history ever since the earliest origins of the human endeavor to know more.

In the 20th century the global village foreseen by Marshall McLuhan generated a kind of vital epicenter, but at the same time it was a source of conflicts and especially in relation to subjects such as the quality of metrics that are used to measure progress in the spaces that exist between the interrelations of the various different subject disciplines. It is easy to detect how in the 21st century many detractors of the measurement of the quality of the interactive systems resorted to a myriad of ploys to play down the importance that exists in the intersection between the formal and the factual sciences and also the humanities and hardware/software.

Today, it would be relatively easy to analyse the mistakes of those who at the end of the 20th century saw the multimedia as a union of media, when in reality it is an intersection of the same. This intersection was easily detectable by the communication professionals, from the social point of view, for instance. However, initially that crossroads was rejected from the computer science perspective. By way of example, for a large part of the last decade of the past century overlapping concepts were ignored, especially when the issues concerning multimedia communications and the measurement of the quality of the communicative process among human beings through computers were approached. in few words, that denial derived from a lack of training and/or experience of what should have been a 360 degree vista between the formal and factual sciences.

Actually, such a holistic vision mustn’t be understood simply as synonymous with of interdisciplinary study, but rather as a balance between theories and practices of the formal and factual sciences. the current virtual space intends to locate that balance among amongst all of the components of the multimedia interactive systems, including their variables and also their relationships, from the point of view of software as well as the point of view of hardware. it is a context where scientific information occupies a predominant place and around it we find many of the key elements for the current and also future trends in the informative systems as a whole.

In this field the details of the informative systems, especially aimed at interactive multimedia, scientific visualization, content of scientific information, amongst so many other issues related to computer science engineering, software, systems, telecommunications, electronics, etc., are all studied in detail. In other words, these are the fundamental issues that we all will have to approach on a daily basis as future professionals of the informative systems, and as we enbark on a journey towards a new era: “the expansion of communicability”.

Many conferences are focussed on specific aspects of HCI, computer science, advanced visual interfaces, computer art and interaction, etc. and bring together leading experts in a particular field or sometimes on a specific technology. At such large conferences students are often marginalized or relegated to poster sessions. The workshops, symposia, etc., are not a big scale and aim to promote dialogue between established professors and graduate students working on new directions. Hence topics from the whole range of human-computer interaction, computer vision, mobile computing devices, multimedia, software, hardware, etc. are welcomed. Last year’s workshops, symposia, etc., organized by ALAIPO and AInCI, for instance, included papers, research-in-progress, etc., on the topics (see below the alphabetical order).

All contributions –papers, research-in-progress, workshops, demos, posters and doctoral consortium, should be of high quality, originality, clarity, significance and impact. In the current international conference it is demonstrated how with a correct integration among professionals of formal and factual sciences interesting research lines in the following subjects 3D, APPs Programming, Interfaces, Augmented Reality, Computer Graphics, Computer Vision, Interaction, Communicablity, Design, Emerging Interactive Technologies, ICT, Information Management, Metrics, Mobile Computing, Telecommunication, Multimedia Systems, Quality Evaluation, Networking, Scientific Information and Informatics, Software and Systems Engineering, UX, Education, and other computational areas are solicited on, but not limited to (alphabetical order):

Design and Interactive Communication

:: Adaptive Interfaces
:: Cognitive Modeling
:: Communicability
:: Cross-Cultural Design for the Aged Population
:: Ergonomics
:: Human-Computer Communication
:: Interface Metaphors
:: Interfaces for Collaborative Work
:: Linguistics and Semiotics for Interactive Design
:: Models of Design for Interactive Systems
:: Tangible and Embodied Interaction for Education, Tourism, Cultural & Natural Heritage

Multimedia Systems and ICT

:: Auditory Contents of Multimedia
:: Big Multimedia Data Analytics
:: Interaction in VR, MR and Games
:: Methods and Techniques for Assessment of Multimedia Systems
:: Mobile APIs and Services
:: Mobile Social Network Interaction
:: Multimedia Systems and Architecture
:: Networking and Connectivity
:: Pervasive and Mobile Computing
:: Ubiquitous Multimedia

Computer Science, Scientific Information and Visualization

:: Computer Graphics and Interaction
:: Computer Vision
:: Data Science and Digital Repositories
:: Emerging Trends and Technologies for Mobile Scientific Visualization
:: e-Science in the Cloud
:: HCI and Visual Navigation
:: Image Processing
:: Medical Informatics
:: Scientific Journalism
:: Scientific Publications and Informatics
:: Virtual Agents and Behaviour Computer Animation

Knowledge, Software Quality and Global Village

:: Augmented Cognitive in New Media
:: Cyber Behaviour
:: Data Management and Mining
:: Ethics and Aesthetics for Interactive Contents Online
:: Globalization and IT
:: Human and Social Factors for Software Quality
:: Intelligent Systems and UX for Education
:: Knowledge Management
:: Natural Language Processing
:: Quality Attributes and Metrics in the Interactive Systems

All submitted papers will be reviewed by a double-blind (at least three reviewers), non-blind, and participative peer review. These three kinds of review will support the selection process of those that will be accepted for their presentation at the international conference. Authors of accepted papers who registered in the conference can have access to the evaluations and possible feedback provided by the reviewers who recommended the acceptance of their papers, so they can accordingly improve the final version of their papers.

Best regards,

Francisco V. Cipolla Ficarra (Chair – coordinator)
&
Doris Edison and Pamela Fulton (International Secretariat)

ALAIPO: Asociación Latina Interacción Persona-Ordenador –Latin Association of HCI (www.alaipo.com) and AINCI: Asociación Internacional de la Comunicación Interactiva –International Association of Interactive Communication (www.ainci.com). Address: Via Tabajani 1, S. 15 (7) – 24121 (Bergamo) Italy :: c/ Angel Baixeras, 5 – AP 1638 – 08080 (Barcelona), Spain. Email: info@alaipo.com :: info@ainci.com

2. The conference have the following deadlines

Work Submissions: Open. Consequently, as they are received, they will be evaluated. It is a way to speed up the process to make up the final program of the international conference, visa requirements, should plan travel well in advance, etc. In other words, it is not necessary to wait until the deadline to send them for the evaluation process.

Deadline Works Submissions: November, 30th – local time in Hawaiian Islands

Authors Notification: Two/three weeks after the submission/s

Camera-ready, full papers: January, 20th

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