Please Vote!
ACM SIGGRAPH needs your help electing members of the Executive Committee. This election will fill the role of Treasurer as well as two Directors At Large. It also includes important Bylaw changes.
Each candidate on the ballot has authored a position statement explaining their vision of what they hope to accomplish as member of the EC. Reviewing these statements and exploring member profiles will be useful in making informed decisions. Learn about the candidates and the Bylaw changes and cast your vote before 16:00 UTC 15 August 2018!
Treasurer Candidates
- Brad Lawrence
- David Spoelstra
Director At Large Candidates
- Mashhuda Glencross
- Evan Hirsch
- Terrance Masson
- Paul Strauss
Members of ACM SIGGRAPH who are in good standing as of June 1, 2018 have been sent voting information in an email message or letter from Election Services Corporation (ESC). 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 have not received an email from ESC, please contact them at acmsighelp@electionservicescorp.com or toll-free at 1-866-720-4357. If you received the email, but need to retrieve your PIN you can do so as well.
Bylaw Changes
Changes introduced in proposed amendment to the ACM SIGGRAPH Bylaws:
- All elected positions will be director positions and ACM SIGGRAPH’s officers will no longer be elected to specific positions through member elections.
- EC to appoint up to three voting members to its rank from core constituencies as needed
- Elect the directors to specific position
The first major change is that all elected positions will be director positions and ACM SIGGRAPH’s officers will no longer be elected to specific positions through member elections. Every year, after the new EC takes office, it 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 after the next election.
The second major change is to allow the EC to appoint up to three voting members to its rank. This change will allow the EC to increase representation from core constituencies as needed, and to allow key volunteers — such as the Conference Advisory Group Chair — full participation on the EC to better reflect their role in the organization.
The third major change is to elect the directors to specific positions. For example, if three director positions are open in a given election, the voters would be presented with at least two candidates for position A, another two for position B, etc. This change will allow the nominating committee to achieve increased diversity in skillset, area of expertise, and geography.
The other minor changes to the bylaws are changing current titles, for example, renaming “President,” to the new title of “Chair”, and changes that bring us into compliance with ACM or current practice for SIGGRAPH (e.g., the timing of the election).
The ACM SIGGRAPH Executive Committee believes that, taken together, these changes will allow for a more agile SIGGRAPH organization, better able to focus and act on the strategic issues concerning the field of computer graphics and interactive techniques.
Please see a copy of the proposed ACM SIGGRAPH Bylaws here.
Jose M. Alvarez is a Senior Deep Learning Engineer at NVIDIA working on scaling-up deep learning for autonomous driving. Previously, he was a senior researcher at Toyota Research Institute and at Data61/CSIRO (formerly NICTA) working on deep learning for large scale dynamic scene understanding. Prior to that, he worked as a postdoctoral researcher at New York University under the supervision of Prof. Yann LeCun. He graduated with his Ph.D. from Autonomous University of Barcelona (UAB) in October 2010, with focus on robust road detection under real-world driving conditions. Dr. Alvarez did research stays at the University of Amsterdam (in 2008 and 2009) and the Electronics Research Group at Volkswagen (in 2010) and Boston College. Since 2014, he has served as an associate editor for IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems.
Simon is the Simulation Architect at 
Jose has 20 + years of industry, working at tech giants such as IBM, Microsoft and Uber in areas that range from real-time communications to enterprise security systems. In 2006 he focused his career on Machine Learning, working on content filtering solutions for Family Safety at Microsoft, where he headed the delivery of the first SmartScreen anti-phishing solution for Internet Explorer 7. He later drove the development of paid search relevance models for mobile devices at Bing Ads and worked on applying Machine Learning to geospatial problems at Bing Maps, continuing that work after joining Uber in 2015. In 2017 he joined the 
Miguel Ferreira after helping brands, like Ferrero, De Agostini, MindChamps, shape the mobile entertainment space, he is now Senior Software Engineer at CVEDIA, where he pushes the boundaries of real-time rendering, developing sensor models for cutting-edge deep learning applications. 
Yongjoon Lee is Engineering Manager of Simulation at 
Ming C. Lin is currently the Elizabeth Stevinson Iribe Chair of Computer Science at the University of Maryland College Park and John R. & Louise S. Parker Distinguished Professor Emerita of Computer Science at the University of North Carolina (UNC), Chapel Hill. She is also an honorary Chair Professor (Yangtze Scholar) at Tsinghua University in China. She obtained her B.S., M.S., and Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from the University of California, Berkeley. She received several honors and awards, including the NSF Young Faculty Career Award in 1995, Honda Research Initiation Award in 1997, UNC/IBM Junior Faculty Development Award in 1999, UNC Hettleman Award for Scholarly Achievements in 2003, Beverly W. Long Distinguished Professorship 2007-2010, Carolina Women’s Center Faculty Scholar in 2008, UNC WOWS Scholar 2009-2011, IEEE VGTC Virtual Reality Technical Achievement Award in 2010, and many best paper awards at international conferences. She is a Fellow of ACM, IEEE, and Eurographics.
Dinesh Manocha is the Paul Chrisman Iribe Chair in Computer Science & Electrical and Computer Engineering at the 
Kevin is the founder and CEO of 
Ashu Rege is the Vice President of Software at 
German Ros is a Research Scientist at 
Philipp Slusallek is Scientific Director at the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI), where he heads the research area on Agents and Simulated Reality. At 
Gavriel State is a Senior Director, System Software at NVIDIA, based in Toronto, where he leads efforts involving applications of AI technology to gaming and vice versa, in addition to work in remastering games for NVIDIA’s SHIELD TV platform. Previously, Gav founded TransGaming Inc, and spent 15 years focused on games and rendering technologies.
Dr. Barral is the Chair of the Department of Foundational Science at the Kaiser Permanente School of Medicine. In this role, Dr. Barral provides overall leadership for faculty members in this department and oversees education of medical students in the basic biomedical sciences. He collaborates with the Departments of Health Systems Science and Clinical Science on the development of educational activities that incorporate concepts and skills from each of these three major disciplines into the curriculum. Dr. Barral serves as an integral member of the Founding Dean’s leadership team to develop the strategic and tactical plan for implementation of the School.
At the University of Texas Medical Branch Dr. Barral served as tenured Professor and Vice Chair for Operations in the Department of Neuroscience, Cell Biology & Anatomy in the School of Medicine, Senior Associate Dean for Academic Affairs in the Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences, and Director of the MD-PhD Combined Degree Program. Dr. Barral’s commitment to education and research has been recognized by numerous awards and appointments, including the University of Texas Regents’ Outstanding Teaching Award, induction into the University of Texas Kenneth I. Shine, M.D., Academy of Health Science Education, and selection as a Pew Scholar in the Biomedical Sciences.
Dr. Barral obtained his medical degree from the Instituto Tecnológico y de Estudios Superiores de Monterrey in México and his PhD in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology from Baylor College of Medicine in Houston. Subsequently, he performed his post-doctoral studies on in vivo protein folding and molecular chaperones at the Max Planck Institute for Biochemistry in Germany. Dr. Barral’s work has been published in prestigious journals, including Nature, Science and Cell.
Sam Glassenberg
Sam has spent his career leading teams and companies across the video game industry.
He began his career at LucasArts, and subsequently moved on to Microsoft, where he managed the DirectX graphics team – responsible for designing and standardizing GPU capabilities across the industry.
Sam joined video game startup FTX Games as CEO in 2008. Under his leadership, the company became a premier publisher of mobile games based on Hollywood movies and TV shows including Mission:Impossible, Rocky, and The Hunger Games. FTX games was successfully acquired by Playtech (PTEC) in 2016.
As CEO and founder of Level Ex, Sam and his team of veteran game designers and developers unleash the latest rendering techniques and game mechanics from the video game industry into the field of medicine. Level Ex’s mobile games have rallied hundreds of thousands of healthcare professionals across multiple medical specialties.
Sam’s name is featured on several technology patents, popular video game titles, and he has been the recipient of numerous industry awards. He currently sits on major industry advisory boards, including Intel and Khronos. Sam holds an M.S. in Computer Science, Graphics from Stanford University, and a B.S. in Computer Engineering from the University of Illinois.
Christopher Khoury
Christopher Khoury is vice president of the environmental intelligence unit at the American Medical Association (AMA). The unit focuses on assessing and interacting with emerging elements across health care, business and policy sectors. He also leads collaborations, strategic partnerships and core innovation initiatives at the AMA.
He has worked in the healthcare sector for 17 years. Prior to joining AMA, he was senior manager at PwC’s Health Research Institute (HRI), where he developed thought leadership and provided strategic guidance to clients on biopharmaceuticals, life sciences, health reform, and consumer issues. He began his career in medical device R&D and product development, and subsequently in health data analytics at an academic medical center.
Christopher is the author of several publications and a frequent presenter on business issues across healthcare. He also holds patents covering biotechnology subjects. He earned an M.B.A. from The Ohio State University Fisher College of Business magna cum laude. Christopher received his B.S. from the University of Illinois and holds an M.S. in biomedical engineering from the University of Wisconsin.
Abner Mason
Abner Mason is the Founder and CEO of 
Patrick Wayte is Senior Vice President of the AHA’s Center for Health Technology and Innovation. In this role he leads integrated digital health initiatives across the health continuum – with a focus on secondary prevention, healthcare transition, 
Chris Bregler currently works at Google. He was on the faculty at New York University and Stanford University and has worked for several companies including Hewlett Packard, Interval, Disney Feature Animation, LucasFilm's ILM, Facebook's Oculus, and the New York Times. He received his M.S. and Ph.D. in Computer Science from U.C. Berkeley and his Diplom from Karlsruhe University. In 2016 he received an Academy Award in the Oscar's Science and Technology category. He has been named Stanford Joyce Faculty Fellow, Terman Fellow, and Sloan Research Fellow. He received the Olympus Prize for achievements in computer vision and pattern recognition and was awarded the IEEE Longuet-Higgins Prize for "Fundamental Contributions in Computer Vision that have withstood the test of time". His work has resulted in numerous awards from the National Science Foundation, Sloan Foundation, Packard Foundation, Electronic Arts, Microsoft, Google, U.S. Navy, U.S. Airforce, N.S.A, C.I.A. and other sources.He's been the executive producer of Squidball.net, which required building the world's largest real-time motion capture volume, and a massive multi-player motion game holding several world records in The Motion Capture Society. He has been active in the visual effects industry, for example, as the lead developer of ILM's Multitrack system that has been used in many feature film productions, including Avatar, Avengers, Noah, Star Trek, and Star Wars.
Alexei (Alyosha) Efros joined UC Berkeley in 2013. Prior to that, he was nine years on the faculty of Carnegie Mellon University, and has also been affiliated with École Normale Supérieure/INRIA and University of Oxford. His research is in the area of computer vision and computer graphics, especially at the intersection of the two. He is particularly interested in using data-driven techniques to tackle problems where large quantities of unlabeled visual data are readily available. Efros received his PhD in 2003 from UC Berkeley. He is a recipient of CVPR Best Paper Award (2006), NSF CAREER award (2006), Sloan Fellowship (2008), Guggenheim Fellowship (2008), Okawa Grant (2008), Finmeccanica Career Development Chair (2010), SIGGRAPH Significant New Researcher Award (2010), ECCV Best Paper Honorable Mention (2010), 3 Helmholtz Test-of-Time Prizes (1999,2003,2005), and the ACM Prize in Computing (2016).
Hany Farid has been serving as the Albert Bradley 1915 Third Century Professor and Chair of Computer Science at Dartmouth until 2017. After a sabbatical in 2018-2019, he is joining the faculty of Computer Science at University of California at Berkeley in 2019, Farid’s research focuses on digital forensics, image analysis, and human perception. He received my undergraduate degree in Computer Science and Applied Mathematics from the University of Rochester in 1989, an M.S. in Computer Science from SUNY Albany, and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Pennsylvania in 1997. Following a two-year post-doctoral fellowship in Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT, he joined the faculty at Dartmouth in 1999. He is the recipient of an Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship, a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, and he is a Fellow of the IEEE and National Academy of Inventors. He is also the Chief Technology Officer and co-founder of Fourandsix Technologies and a Senior Adviser to the Counter Extremism Project.
Ira Kemelmacher-Shlizerman is a Scientist and Entrepreneur. Ira's interests are in the intersection of computer vision, computer graphics and learning. A major part of her work is to invent virtual and augmented reality experiences to empower people in their day to day activities, and develop algorithms for modeling people from unconstrained photos, videos, audio and language. Dr. Kemelmacher-Shlizerman is an Assistant Professor in the Allen School at the University of Washington.
Hao Li is CEO/Co-Founder of Pinscreen, assistant professor of Computer Science at the University of Southern California, and the director of the Vision and Graphics Lab at the USC Institute for Creative Technologies. Hao's work in Computer Graphics and Computer Vision focuses on digitizing humans and capturing their performances for immersive communication and telepresence in virtual worlds. His research involves the development of novel geometry processing, data-driven, and deep learning algorithms.