SIGGRAPH-ASIA

Chairing the Technical Papers program of a SIGGRAPH Asia conference is a daunting responsibility. This is a direct consequence of the prestige and recognition of SIGGRAPH or SIGGRAPH Asia publications, and the importance of acceptance or rejection for each submitting author.

I had two main goals when I accepted this task: 1) ensure that the process works in a way which as fair as possible, and 2) continue the task of my two predecessors, K. Akeley (SIGGRAPH Asia 2008 Papers Chair) and N. Max (SIGGRAPH Asia 2009 Papers Chair), to establish SIGGRAPH Asia publications at exactly the same level of scientific excellence as ACM SIGGRAPH and "normal" ACM Transactions on Graphics papers.

The process began in the fall of 2009, when I started putting together my Technical Papers Committee, consisting of 36 experts in all areas of computer graphics. After the deadline in May 2010, the four sorters, F. Durand, H. Rushmeier, C. O'Sullivan and L. Kobbelt came to Sophia-Antipolis in France to distribute the submissions to the committee members. The procedure followed was exactly the same as that of the summer SIGGRAPH conference, and is described in detail in the call for participation website.

The committee met for two days (July 23rd/24th, 2010) just before the SIGGRAPH conference in Los Angeles. Of the 274 papers submitted, the committee selected 49, giving an acceptance rate of 18 per cent, a little lower than the SIGGRAPH/SIGGRAPH Asia average. Another 20 papers were judged by the committee to be excellent but needing extra work which required more than the one month revision period for SIGGRAPH Asia papers. These were referred to ACM Transactions of Graphics "with major revision." If these papers are finally accepted, the authors will have the opportunity to present at a future SIGGRAPH or SIGGRAPH Asia conference.

The papers accepted cover all areas of computer graphics and interactive techniques: sampling and filtering, rendering (both traditional and volumetric), modelling, reconstruction and geometric editing, computational imagery, imaging hardware as well as image and video techniques, animation for characters and crowds, fluids, flows, soft and rigid objects.

In contrast to most such prefaces in previous SIGGRAPH and SIGGRAPH Asia proceedings, I am happy to report that I made no major changes to the process this year. It is my opinion that the work of previous chairs (both SIGGRAPH and SIGGRAPH Asia), has resulted in a process which is now quite stable. Interestingly, I did not receive a single complaint from a submitting author about a decision. I would like to interpret this as a sign that the process, however imperfect, has achieved a level of fairness that is appreciated by the community.