S2002 News

SIGGRAPH 2002 was awesome! It had everything we had hoped we could present and it had to be up there as one of the smoothest running conferences in history. This is no small feat considering it was the first really technical conference that the HBGCC staff had worked on. The job done by everyone on the SIGGRAPH 2002 committee has set a standard on how you put together a conference. Congratulations to all of us.

Since everything ran so smoothly, I got to spend a lot of my week talking to those who were there. I tried to get a good cross sample of people so I spoke with attendees, contributors, and exhibitors. I asked all of them what they thought of the conference and what they thought of San Antonio. The resounding reply that I received is that the conference had some of the best material seen in years and, although it was a little warm, almost everyone thought San Antonio was a wonderful city for a conference. Personally, I didn't quite understand the comments about it being too warm but then again, I had to travel north to get to San Antonio.

It has truly been a wonderful adventure working with the S2002 committee that goes back to our first meeting as a group in January 2001. We met in San Antonio and spent the weekend trying to figure out what S2002 was going to be. After that first meeting, I received the comment that by the end of the weekend, the S2002 committee was functioning on a group level that you normally don't see until it has been together for a considerably longer time. From there we continued to get better, tackling each obstacle as it popped up, working together to help everyone achieve the vision of each program chair. Great job everyone!

I look forward to seeing everyone again in Melbourne.

Tom appolloni@siggraph.org

San Antonio Factoid: San Antonio was the host city to the 29th International Conference on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques.