Join SIGGRAPH

News

Suggest a News Story

SIGGRAPH Academy

Mar 25, 2019 |

SIGGRAPH Academy

This year we were pleased to announce the SIGGRAPH Academy at SIGGRAPH 2018 in Vancouver. The initial class of inductees was drawn from previous award winners. However, moving forward, our goal is to induct a broader range of individuals who have made substantial contributions to our field. To accomplish this, we need nominations for the Academy from across all of computer graphics. 

Here is the information you need to make a nomination:

Nominations for the ACM SIGGRAPH Academy may be submitted by contacting the SIGGRAPH Academy Award Chair before 31 January each year.

Eligibility Criteria:

  • The criteria for election to the ACM SIGGRAPH Academy are
  • Cumulative contributions to the field of computer graphics and interactive techniques
  • Impact on the field through development of new research directions and/or innovations
  • Influence on the work of others
  • Reasonably active participant in the ACM SIGGRAPH community
  • All accomplished members of the ACM SIGGRAPH  community will be eligible to be nominated including researchers, practitioners, technologists, artists, designers, and educators.

Nominations will require:

  • A brief summary (in English, maximum one page) explaining how the nominee meets the criteria
  • Supporting letters of exactly three endorsers. Endorsers should themselves have achieved distinction in the field. Endorsers will need to have personal knowledge of the candidate’s work. Endorsers will provide a brief endorsement statement giving their personal assessment of the candidate’s impact on the field.
  • Nominator’s name, address, telephone number, and email address.

ACM SIGGRAPH Academy Committee

  • Holly Rushmeier, Chair
  • John Fujii
  • Cynthia Beth Rubin
  • Hugues Hoppe
  • Nelson Max
  • Hans-Peter Seidel

We look forward to receiving your nominations!

— Holly Rushmeier

Accepting Nominations for the International Resources Committee Chair

Dec 7, 2018 |

Accepting Nominations for the International Resources Committee Chair

The mission of the International Resources Committee (IRC) is to extend the reach and influence of the ACM SIGGRAPH conferences and organization globally through language and intercultural support. The year-long activities of the committee include:

  • Creation of multilingual audio guides (recorded translations) for the SIGGRAPH and SIGGRAPH Asia programs: Emerging Technologies, VR Village, Art Gallery and Studio, with the aim of bridging the cultural and language gap between the many branches of the ACM SIGGRAPH organization and the rest of the world.
  • Providing services of such as translations, international path-finding and networking.
  • Bi-monthly media asset production of SIGGRAPH Spotlight episodes with interviews with professionals from around the world, as well as bi-monthly contributions to the ACM SIGGRAPH Blog.
  • Promoting ACM SIGGRAPH, the SIGGRAPH conferences, and articles of general computer graphics interest worldwide through our social media channels.
  • Hosting events of general and/or regional interest at the ACM SIGGRAPH Theatre during the SIGGRAPH conference and the SIGGRAPH Asia conference.
  • Collaborate with other committees in terms of development (e.g. “Triviatron”, the IRC trivia game which is part of the SIGGRAPH VR game “ScavengAR”).

The Chair of the International Resources Committee interacts with the upper ACM SIGGRAPH management as well as Conference Committee Chairs. The Chair has a term of three years.

The responsibilities of the Chair include:

  • Coordinate the creation of assets for the SIGGRAPH Spotlight (recorded interviews) and Blog articles
  • Coordinate the creation of multilingual audio guides (translations and recordings) for SIGGRAPH and SIGGRAPH Asia
  • Coordinate the regular publications of ACM, ACM SIGGRAPH, SIGGRAPH and CG/Animation related news in the IRC social media channels
  • Coordinate the creation of IRC graphics content like infographics, logos, booth graphics, and any other material that helps to brand the IRC
  • Supervise the English Review Service for SIGGRAPH and SIGGRAPH Asia
  • Select and work together with the International Center Manager in the organization and curation of the ACM SIGGRAPH Theater presentations at SIGGRAPH, as well as the presentations at SIGGRAPH Asia.
  • Find new ways to collaborate with other ACM SIGGRAPH Standing Committees
  • Keep the team informed of the committee activities through newsletters

This list of activities is what constitutes the core of the work in the International Resources Committee. We expect the new Chair will continue or improve this set of activities in a way that creates greater impact to the organization and support to contributors and attendees at the conferences. We also recognize that no one individual can be expert in best practices across all of the constituencies of ACM SIGGRAPH and expect that the chair will rely heavily on their committee to supplement their own expertise.

The Chair of the International Resources Committee should expect to spend an average of 6-8 hours per week on committee business.

If you are interested in this position, please contact: Rebecca Strzelec.

 

ACM SIGGRAPH’S New External Relations Chair to Build Bridges, Fuel Collaborations

ACM SIGGRAPH’S New External Relations Chair to Build Bridges, Fuel Collaborations

Nov 27, 2018 |

ACM SIGGRAPH’S NEW EXTERNAL RELATIONS CHAIR TO BUILD BRIDGES, FUEL COLLABORATIONS

by Melanie Farmer
ACM SIGGRAPH has named Diana Arellano Chair of External Relations, to strengthen ties and form new collaborations with organizations within the computer graphics community and with those communities that intersect with computer graphics. Arellano, whose connection to the SIGGRAPH conference began as a student volunteer in 2007, most recently served as International Resources Chair. She will assume her new role as External Relations Chair, effective immediately. “I am thrilled to have Diana take on this new leadership role as we get ready to really ramp up our efforts in external affairs,” says ACM SIGGRAPH President Jessica Hodgins. “Diana’s extensive experience as a SIGGRAPH volunteer and her collaborative mindset will greatly benefit our aim to create and build new partnerships outside of SIGGRAPH that will help grow our organization. As International Resources Chair for the past two years, she has worked successfully to build bridges between ACM SIGGRAPH and the computer graphics community around the world.” Forging new ties between ACM SIGGRAPH and the global CG community has been vital to the organization’s mission to continue to move forward and evolve. The focus on growth and new outcomes is what excites Arellano most about this new role. “As External Relations Chair, I will be able to help create real links and agreements between ACM SIGGRAPH and other organizations, conferences and companies that will benefit and help the growth of both parties,” she says. “Creating new contacts for the organization, brainstorming about effective ways to collaborate with other fields tangential to computer graphics and further represent ACM SIGGRAPH are what drew me to take on this new role. I am excited to get started!” Arellano will work to identify new communities interested in forging a collaboration in computer graphics; ideal sectors are areas that need the skills of researchers and practitioners in computer graphics such as artificial intelligence, data science, data visualization, simulation, robotics, and healthcare. In fact, the foundation for creating these links were set at SIGGRAPH 2018 in Vancouver, where workshops were organized centered on some of these topics. Arellano will begin forming a committee soon to help drive this mission and also intends to work closely with the New Communities Strategy team to help crystallize their ideas for new initiatives into a full-fledged collaborations. “I cannot wait to see what combinations of fields, geographical locations and needs for synergies we will come up with,” she adds, “and moreover, to start collaborating with other ACM SIGGRAPH members who are already working in this direction.” Arellano, whose research expertise is in affective computing combined with machine learning, works as software developer and team leader in the Pipeline Department at Mackevision Medien Design in Stuttgart, Germany, a leading company in 3D car visualization and VFX. Prior to chairing ACM SIGGRAPH’s International Resources Committee, she also volunteered as a member of the committee for six years. Additionally, Arellano co-organizes discussion panels on Women in CG and Visual Arts at FMX and SIGGRAPH.  
LET’S DRAW!: New Deep Learning Technique for Realistic Caricature Art

LET’S DRAW!: New Deep Learning Technique for Realistic Caricature Art

Oct 31, 2018 |

Press Release

LET’S DRAW!: NEW DEEP LEARNING TECHNIQUE FOR REALISTIC CARICATURE ART

Data-driven method leverages deep learning AI for photo-to-caricature translation

TOKYO, Japan, 16 October 2018 – Caricature portrait drawing is a distinct art form where artists sketch a person’s face in an exaggerated manner, most times to elicit humor. Automating this technique poses challenges due to the amount of intricate details and shapes involved and level of professional skills it takes to transform a person artistically from their real-life selves to a creatively exaggerated one.

A team of computer scientists from City University of Hong Kong and Microsoft, have developed an innovative deep learning-based approach to automatically generate the caricature of a given portrait, and to enable users to do so efficiently and realistically.

“Compared to traditional graphics-based methods which define hand-crafted rules, our novel approach leverages big data and machine learning to synthesize caricatures from thousands of examples drawn by professional artists,” says Kaidi Cao, lead author, who is currently a graduate student in computer science at Stanford University but conducted the work during his internship at Microsoft. “While existing style transfer methods have focused mainly on appearance style, our technique achieves both geometric exaggeration and appearance stylization involved in caricature drawing.”

The method enables users to automate caricatures of portraits, and can be applied to tasks such as creating caricatured avatars for social media, and designing cartoon characters. The technique also has potential applications in marketing, advertising and journalism.

Cao collaborated on the research with Jing Liao of City University of Hong Kong and Lu Yuan of Microsoft, and the three plans to present their work at SIGGRAPH Asia 2018 in Tokyo from 4 December to 7 December. The annual conference features the most respected technical and creative members in the field of computer graphics and interactive techniques, and showcases leading edge research in science, art, gaming and animation, among other sectors. 

In this work, the researchers turned to a well-known technique in machine learning, Generative Adversarial Network (GAN), for unpaired photo-to-caricature translation to generate caricatures that preserve the identity of the portrait. Called “CariGANs”, the computational framework precisely models geometric exaggeration in photos (shapes of faces, specific angles) and appearance stylization (look, feel, pencil strokes, shadowing) via two algorithms the researchers have labeled, CariGeoGAN and CariStyGAN.

CariGeoGAN only models the geometry-to-geometry mapping from face photos to caricatures and CariStyGAN transfers the style appearance from caricatures to face photos without any deformation to the geometry of the original image. The two networks are separately trained for each task so that the learning procedure is more robust, notes the researchers. The CariGANs framework enables users to control the exaggeration degree in geometric and appearance style by dragging slides or giving an example caricature.

Cao and collaborators conducted perceptual studies to evaluate their framework’s ability to generate caricatures of portraits that are easily recognizable and not overly distorted in shape and appearance style. For example, one study assessed how well the identity of an image is preserved using the CariGANs method in comparison to existing methods for translating caricature art. They demonstrated, through several examples, that existing methods resulted in unrecognizable caricature translation. Study participants found it too difficult to match the resulting caricatures with the original subjects because the end results were far too exaggerated or unclear. The researchers’ method successfully generated clearer, more accurate caricature depictions of portrait photos, as if they were hand drawn by a professional artist.

Currently, the focus of this work has centered on caricatures of people, primarily headshots or portraits. In future work, the researchers intend to explore beyond facial caricature generation into full body or more complex scenes. They are also interested in designing improved human-computer interaction (HCI) systems that would give users more freedom and user control on the machine learning-generated results.

For the authors’ paper, titled “CariGANs: Unpaired Photo-to-Caricature Translation”, and supplementary material, visit the team’s project page.

To register for SIGGRAPH Asia, and for more details of the event, visit http://sa2018.siggraph.org. For more information on the Technical Papers Program, click here.

ACM SIGGRAPH Bylaw Changes Passed

Sep 28, 2018 |

The proposed bylaw changes by the ACM SIGGRAPH Executive Committee (EC) have been approved by the ACM EC when the member voting failed to meet the ten percent rule required for all bylaw changes. These changes will start in the voting taking place in next summer's elections.

The biggest bylaw change is all elected positions will become director positions rather than electing a person to a specific position such as the President, Vice-President, and Treasurer as we have done in the past. The EC will select new officers from within the EC to serve one-year terms. The officers will be the Chair, Chair-Elect, Treasurer, and Treasurer-Elect. The Chair-Elect will become the Chair and the Treasurer-Elect will become the Treasurer the following year.

As some of you know, choosing to volunteer, particularly for these key leadership roles, is a huge time commitment. Many of us are at junctures in our careers where we may not be able to volunteer for one of these larger roles due to time constraints; this new structure within the EC would share the work more broadly across the directors of the EC and lessen the burden on a specific position. It is our hope in adopting this new structure our nominating committee will have a larger, more diverse pool of candidates who would consider taking on a leadership position within the EC.

The SIGGRAPH EC worked with experts in nonprofit governance to put forth modifications around the organization’s structure and processes of voting/elected positions. Internal elections are becoming standard practice for nonprofit, volunteer-run boards, as are one-year terms for the elected officers.

The second important change revolved around creating a structure that accurately reflects our diverse community and will enable us to be more representative of our membership. Instead of being presented with a total of N+1 candidates for N positions as is specified in the previous version of the Bylaws, voters will be presented with at least two candidates for each specific position. This will enable the ACM SIGGRAPH Nomination committee to “bucket” candidates into positions to ensure all open director roles aren’t filled, for instance, with members who are from academia or that the EC doesn’t have only representation from North America. With this modification to the Bylaws, the nominating committee is able to achieve increased diversity in skillset, area of expertise, and geography on the EC.

Lastly, the third major change to the Bylaws is the EC will be allowed to appoint three voting members to its rank. Currently, the both Chairs of the Conference Advisory Groups for the North America and Asia, for instance, serves in an ex officio, non-voting capacity. As we are all aware, both SIGGRAPH conferences are our group’s marquis outward-facing programs, and we feel it is important to have at least one of these individuals in a voting position. This change will also allow the EC to increase representation and expertise from core constituencies as needed to complement the make-up of the elected EC.

The EC worked on these modifications for the past two years to achieve a more modern, efficient, flexible, and diverse volunteer-run operation. These Bylaw changes will allow us to be more representative of the ACM SIGGRAPH membership, and in turn, help us create a strategic direction and programs that will better benefit the entire community.