This new proposed Conference Papers program aims to provide a high-quality publication venue that brings the workload of publishing a graphics and interactive techniques paper in line with other top quality conferences, as well as to diversify the topics we publish in graphics and interactive techniques. Being distinct from the Technical Papers program, the most significant difference is that Technical Papers are journal articles published in ACM Transactions on Graphics (TOG) and in the ACM Digital Library, while the new Conference Papers will be published as conference papers in the form of “SIGGRAPH Conference Proceedings” solely in the ACM Digital Library. Conference Papers may subsequently be extended and submitted to applicable journals pending the addition of new material as per the requirements of relevant journals in our field (see section 5, below for applicable TOG restrictions).
The proposed Conference Papers venue will be held to the same high standard for novelty and/or robust contribution, scientific rigor, and technical soundness. Both Conference Papers and Technical Papers will be reviewed with a rigorous technical process. However, Conference Papers can be technically sound with promising and concise evaluations. A Technical Paper, however, requires the idea to be extensively tried and tested and is demonstrably superior to the state of the art. Accepted Conference Papers will require an unconditional acceptance and minimal changes following the rebuttal process.
If you have an inspiring idea or a well executed work that is technically sound with promising concise evaluations and can describe it in 7 pages; that is a Conference Paper. If you have an inspiring idea that has been extensively tried and tested, is demonstrably superior to the state of the art, and requires more than 7 pages to thoroughly describe and evaluate it; that is a Technical Paper submission (journal paper).
1. Name
The proposed name for this new technical program is Conference Papers.
2. Page Count Restrictions
The maximum page restriction for the new Conference Papers program is 7, excluding the bibliography. This is consistent with AI/ML venues like CVPR and is expected to make it easier to attract submissions from these intersecting communities. The 7 page paper must be complete, in that it should stand on its own for review without reliance on supplementary materials except when elements integral to the core contribution cannot be presented in the paper, e.g., video results for a submission about video editing. Any main results, studies or comparisons must be clearly mentioned in the body of the paper. There will not be a separate deadline for supplementary materials or appendices.
3. Review Process
The proposed review process aims to support building a strong and diverse technical Conference Papers program that retains the same level of quality, rigor and prestige of the SIGGRAPH Technical Papers program. The main factors distinguishing these two technical outlets will be page restrictions, a lower requirement for extensive evaluation and the goal to attract a broader set of topics from intersecting domains.
The review process will broaden the technical papers review committee to handle Conference Papers using the same process as currently used for full Technical Papers adopting a single unified Papers Committee. The review committee will continue to recruit tertiary reviewers. We expect more submissions in adjacent and emerging fields and the committee should have more experts in these fields for handling the additional submissions. This model aims to target a reasonable reviewer workload while maintaining SIGGRAPH’s high technical standards.
The submission deadline for Conference Papers and Technical Papers will be the same. We expect authors to make the choice of which type of paper they choose to submit, these will be either Conference Paper, Technical Paper or Both (subject to meeting the criteria for Conference Papers). These selection options will be included in Linklings. If authors submit to both, the committee will decide if the paper should be accepted to either venue and will decide the appropriate venue for the paper.
To ensure high standards in line with the current Technical Papers program, we envision a review process in line with that of the current Technical Papers track including
- Fully doubly-anonymous reviews
- Strict conflict-of-interest management
- A world-class unified committee whose members have a track record of publishing work at SIGGRAPH and/or in top-tier venues in intersecting domains
- A rebuttal process to allow authors to correct misunderstandings and factual errors in reviews
Given the shorter page count commensurate with the contribution, the evaluation criteria will need to be clearly established relative to those for the Technical Papers. However, the criteria will share similar requirements including originality, clarity, and technical correctness. Due to the page limit, the expectation in terms of aspects of validation and completeness will be significantly different. The emphasis of the evaluation criteria will instead be on experiments demonstrating the technical correctness/merit of an approach, results showing potential for major improvement, e.g., results challenging the status quo, a new application, a user study with a novel hypothesis or methodology, an intriguing system design, or a novel interaction mechanism/metaphor.
Through the guidance of the papers chairs and papers committee, the Conference Papers evaluation criteria will be designed to be appropriate for conference publication, enough to demonstrate promise (possibly relative to the state of the art), but not with the level of thoroughness typically expected in a TOG or other journal publication.
4. Rebuttal Process
The rebuttal process for the new technical conference papers program will be the same as that for SIGGRAPH (TOG) papers. After authors receive their reviews, they will be asked to submit a rebuttal and the reviewers of the manuscript will discuss the paper in light of the rebuttal prior to the committee meeting. For Conference Papers, the purpose of the rebuttal will be to clarify the reviewer’s understanding for the Unified Papers Committee to account for in decisions.
5. Publications Venue
The proposal is to publish this as SIGGRAPH conference papers. Accepted Conference papers will appear in the ACM Digital Library as “Proceedings of SIGGRAPH” and “Proceedings of SIGGRAPH Asia”.
Potentially, having a relationship with either ACM TOG or ACM PACM-CGIT with reviewer continuity may be explored in the future. The current proposal allows for extended conference papers to be submitted to any appropriate journal without any specific agreements in place. For TOG’s rules, see “Revised conference papers https://dl.acm.org/journal/tog/author-guidelines. Note the requirement to add 25% new material to publish in TOG. Additionally, note the restriction that papers that have already been published and presented in a conference, applies to SIGGRAPH or SIGGRAPH Asia Conference Papers. If extended and accepted to ACM TOG, they will not be offered a second oral presentation. Conference Paper authors present their work at SIGGRAPH or at SIGGRAPH Asia. Hence, an updated version of the work can be resubmitted to a journal, but not resubmitted to a future SIGGRAPH or SIGGRAPH Asia Conference.
6. Presentation Format
These papers will be presented employing the same format for Technical Papers at SIGGRAPH and SIGGRAPH Asia Conferences together with a video presentation made available on-demand. The two types of papers will be interleaved in Technical Papers sessions without any distinction.
7. Conference Papers Chair
We recommend appointing a Conference Papers Chair working alongside as an equal partner to the Technical Papers Chair. We expect this role to be important for the first three years of the program as it is being established. It is anticipated that the workload for a single Technical Papers Chair would be overwhelming as this new program will require FAQs, review criteria, a review form, committee members, and processes, which will need to be either adapted or created from scratch. Depending on the number of submissions that eventuate, the need for this role could be revisited once the program is well established. The Conference Papers Chair selection shall follow the same process as the Technical Papers Chair (suggestions from the PAG, selection by the Conference Chair, and approval by the Executive Committee).
8. Impacts on Specialized Conferences
The submission deadline for conference papers being the same as that for Technical papers is expected to mitigate the effect on specialised conferences, some of which attract papers after the jury decisions have been made. It is difficult to exactly project the impact, however, if more Conference Papers are submitted and accepted, it is possible that fewer papers will be submitted to specialized conferences. On the other hand, if the acceptance rate is in line with the current Technical papers acceptance rate, we may see more papers being submitted to specialised conferences after acceptance results are released.
The impact on Technical Communications at SIGGRAPH Asia should also be mitigated by the fact that Conference Papers will have the same deadline as Technical papers, and may potentially improve the quality of Technical Communications with the possibility of rejected Conference Papers being a good fit for scaling down and submitting to SIGGRAPH Asia Technical Briefs.
9. Additional Notes
See here (https://www.siggraph.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/New-Technical-Publication-Program-Google-Forms.pdf) for results of the community survey.
This program shall be automatically reviewed after it has run for three years (after SIGGRAPH Asia 2024).