Goals, Objectives, and Guidelines for SIGGRAPH in Asia

"There is a tide in the affairs of men, Which taken at the flood, leads on to fortune. Omitted, all the voyage of their life is bound in shallows and in miseries. On such a full sea are we now afloat. And we must take the current when it serves, or lose our ventures."

From Julius Caesar by William Shakespeare

Introduction

The purpose of this document is to explain the reasons for starting a SIGGRAPH in Asia (SiA), the progress to date, the goals and objectives of SiA, and some operating guidelines.

Background and Rationale

Asia Pacific (hereafter referred to as Asia) is the fastest growing region in the world in terms of overall economy and science and engineering research. In 2006 the Job Migration Task Force of ACM did a report on Globalization and Offshoring of Software. Chapter 5 of this report was on the Globalization of Information Technology Research. The conclusions are stated below:

"The data showing trends over time all indicate that the preeminence of the United States and Europe is waning, and the gaps between countries are narrowing. It is not a question of whether these gaps will narrow significantly, but when. In particular, the data on PhD degrees conferred indicates a rapid narrowing.

For example, if the trends in Figure 6 continue, the number of PhD degrees in China will equal current US levels in 15 years or so. The output (and particularly the impact) of science from China is not yet rising as quickly, but this is not surprising given the assumption that the number of PhD degrees awarded is a leading indicator of scientific output, and the increase in output has not yet fully responded to the major acceleration in Chinese PhD degrees that started ten years ago.

Unless something seriously derails current trends, it seems almost certain that China will be a research center rivaling the United States and Western Europe in importance within twenty to thirty years. The development of critical scientific infrastructure in India is a few years behind developments in China but moving down a similar road."

The report also indicates that other Asian countries, such as Korea and Singapore are rapidly increasing their research capabilities. Japan is increasing less rapidly but that is because it is already highly developed.

Tina Ziemek carried out a study for ACM SIGGRAPH that focused on the current technology sector in Asia, existing CG conferences in Asia, and SIGGRAPH specific data on the Papers program and overall attendees. Her results on the technology sector are similar to the ACM report, i. e., that the countries in Asia are investing heavily in Information Technology, and especially Digital Media, and that these areas are rapidly growing. Her report included information from several conferences in related areas and showed that there are many new conferences and they are growing in size. Looking at the SIGGRAPH Papers program, her results show that the percentage of papers from Asia has almost tripled in the past ten years and there is a long term trend of decreasing percentage of papers from U. S. authors and a corresponding increase in international authors. While the number and percentage of international and Asian papers has been increasing, the number and percentage of international and Asian attendees has dropped.

This is shown very clearly in the two figures below from her study. The first figure shows that the percentage of papers from Asia has more than doubled in the past few years.

The second figure shows that the number of attendees from Asia has dropped by about a third since 2001. Note that the total attendance of S2005 (29,000) was about a 15% drop from S2001 (34,000) but the drop in Asian attendance was about 30%.

MCI, a strategic partner of Smith Bucklin and Associates, did a Market Feasibility Study for us. There was some overlap with Ziemek's report in that they looked at CG related conferences in Asia. They examined the CG industry and related CG events in the target countries: Australia, China, Japan, Korea, and Singapore. They also looked at the countries in terms of being a conference destination. Their results showed that the number of CG events in Asia almost tripled from 2005 to 2007. Japan was the most active country, followed by China, Australia, Singapore, and South Korea. Singapore was the most active city in hosting CG events, with Tokyo second. Their results for general association meetings show that Singapore was the most popular city in Asia, and the second most popular worldwide. For countries. the top five in Asia were Australia, Japan, China, Singapore, and Korea. Hong Kong is listed separately from China and is in sixth place.

Another method of judging regional interest in a topic is by using Google Trends. If one searches on "SIGGRAPH" and looks at the regions , one sees that the top six regions are all in Asia.

If one looks at the top languages from such a search four of the top ten are Asian. Many Asians also use English for searches.

There is a consistent message from all the above sources that CG activity in Asia is rapidly growing, both in terms of contributions to SIGGRAPH and in having Asian CG conferences. At the same time Asian attendance at SIGGRAPH is decreasing. For several years the SIGGRAPH International Committee has commented on the difficulty of some Asians, especially from China and India, to get visas to come to the U. S. to attend SIGGRAPH. For example, at SIGGRAPH 2006, out of just over 1,600 attendees from Asia, China plus India only had 112 attendees. This is a large and growing community that we are not adequately serving. Thus, we think this is the correct time to start a major new Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques (CG & IT) Conference in Asia - SIGGRAPH in Asia.

Goals

The primary goal is to create a conference that has the technical, creative, and financial success of SIGGRAPH. Initially it will be smaller in size and scope than SIGGRAPH but the goal is that it will grow to be the same size or even larger. From the successful accomplishment of this primary goal several secondary goals can be derived as follows:
1. Create a Conference where Asians and other international delegates from both the technical and creative communities can network.

2. Firmly establish ACM SIGGRAPH as the dominant CG & IT organization in Asia
3. Firmly establish ACM SIGGRAPH as a true international organization.
4. Substantially increase our Asian membership and volunteer base.
5. Provide financial relief to the SIGGRAPH Conference.

The SIGGRAPH in Asia (SiA) Conference will rotate among different cities and countries in Asia. We are defining Asia to mean that part of the world bounded by India to the west and New Zealand to the east and including both northern and southern hemispheres. Potential cities/countries for the first few years include Singapore, Seoul/Korea, Tokyo/Yokohama/Japan, Shanghai/China, and Melbourne/Australia.

Brief History

There has been discussion of this concept for quite a while and it was mentioned at the January, 2006 Strategic meeting. At SIGGRAPH 2006 there was a meeting of several people organized by Asians and it was again discussed. As a result of this meeting, Scott Owen, President of ACM SIGGRAPH, created an SiA Steering Committee (SSC) chaired by Alyn Rockwood, ACM SIGGRAPH Vice President. Alyn discussed the concept at the EC meeting after S2006 and the EC responded favorably to the idea. The Steering Committee expanded to include eleven people from Asia and Scott and Alyn.

The members of the Steering Committee are as follows:

Akshay Darbari Specialist with Tata Elxsi Limited. India representative on SEAGRAPH Board.

John Finnegan - Associate Professor of Graphics Technology, Purdue University. SIGGRAPH 2006 Conference Chair.

David Hook - founding member and chair of the Melbourne ACM SIGGRAPH Professional chapter, Past chair of ANZGRAPH, local organising co-chair for the 2003 GRAPHITE conference, publicity co-chair for
GRAPHITE 2006, current member of the Professional and Student Chapters Committee

Masa Inakage - Professor and Chair of Media Design Program, Graduate School of Media and Governance and Faculty of Environmental Information at Keio University. Founding member and past chair of the Tokyo ACM SIGGRAPH Professional chapter, Past Director-at-Large, ACM SIGGRAPH Executive Committee, chair of Digital Arts Committee

Hyeong-Seok Ko - Professor and Director of the Graphics and Media Lab in the School of Electrical Engineering at Seoul National University. Chair of the Korean Eurographics Chapter.

Yong Tsui (YT) Lee - Associate Professor School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering in Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, co-founder of Singapore chapter of ACM SIGGRAPH and of SEAGRAPH

Nakajima Masayuki - Professor Graduate School of Information Science and Engineering/Computer Science, Tokyo Institute of Technology. Chair of Nicograph

Ming Ouhyoung - Professor Communication and Multimedia Lab Graduate Institute of Networking and Multimedia Department of Computer Science and Information Engineering National Taiwan University. Program Co-Chair of Pacific Graphics 2006.

G. Scott Owen - Professor Emeritus of Computer Science, Georgia State University. ACM SIGGRAPH President, SIGGRAPH 97 Conference Chair, SIGGRAPH CAG Chair 2000-2004.

Zhigang Pan Director, Division of VR and Multimedia, State Key Lab (Chinese equivalent to a U. S. NSF Research Center) of CAD & CG, Zhejiang University. Editor-in-Chief, International Journal of VR.

Alyn Rockwood - Chief Technical Officer FreeDesign, Inc. ACM SIGGRAPH Vice President, SIGGRAPH 2003 Conference Chair, SIGGRAPH 99 Papers Chair.

Harry Shum - Managing Director, Microsoft Research Asia, Beijing.

Seah Hock Soon - Dean and an Associate Professor of the School of Computer Engineering (SCE) at Nanyang Technological University (NTU). Founding president of the ACM SIGGRAPH Singapore Chapter and the Southeast Asian Computer Graphics Society (SEAGRAPH). Co-Programme chair, GRAPHITE 2004.

Viveka Weiley - freelance Interaction and Web designer. Chair of ANZGRAPH

A list serve was set up and the SSC had extensive email dialogue about the concept of SiA and how aspects would need to be modified to fit into Asia. Early on it was decided that it should be called SIGGRAPH in Asia and not SIGGRAPH Asia to reflect the importance of the conference and the fact that it was international and not regional. It was envisioned to be an international conference, but with primarily Asian contributors and attendees, much as SIGGRAPH is international but has primarily North American contributors and attendees. Another early decision was that, at least for the first few years, the SiA Conference Chair should be from the host country. This was so they would have the appropriate influence to negotiate and be comfortable in that country. It was also decided that the best time for the SiA conference was in December or early January to avoid conflict with the Chinese New year which occurs late - January to mid-February.

Meeting in Kuala Lumpur

In December, 2006 in conjunction with the Graphite 2006 the SSC held a two day meeting. The notes from this meeting are at http://www.siggraph.org/org/sia/sia-kl-meeting-notes/. The following topics were discussed at this meeting:

• The organizational structure of ACM, ACM SIGGRAPH, the CAG, and the SIGGRAPH Conference
• The budget, structure, and budget approval of the SIGGRAPH Conference
• The existing policies and procedures of the SIGGRAPH Conference
• How SiA might differ in focus from SIGGRAPH, i.e., which programs might be the same and what potential new areas might be covered, e.g., an emphasis on interactive design and techniques.
• Risks, challenges, potential collaboration and potential marketing efforts.
• Issues that are Asia centric, such as tying the Conference Chair to the host country.
• The use of an Associate Chair who has prior SIGGRAPH experience to help guide the SiA Conference Chair. The Associate Chair (the original name was "Shadow Chair") will work closely with the SiA Chair and advise them on all decisions.

There were also brief presentations of proposals from four cities for the first few SiA Conference; Singapore, Shanghai, Tokyo, and Melbourne. It was decided that Singapore and Tokyo should go forward to be considered for the first SiA Conference. It was decided that the ACM SIGGRAPH Executive Committee needed to approve the concept of an SiA no later than the February meeting if it were to possibly be held in 2008.

At the February EC meeting the EC approved the concept of SiA and chose Singapore, with YT Lee (this was done slightly later), as the first host site. The date of 2008 or 2009 was to be decided later, at the June meeting. SiA will occur in December - January so it will be offset from SIGGRAPH by 4-6 months.

Specific Objectives for the first SiA

For the first SiA to be held in Singapore, the objectives are as follows:

• To be a creative and technical success
• To be within budget, that is to at least break even after all the mandated transfers
• To be the largest CG & IT technical and creative Conference, with an exhibition, in Asia - with at least 1,500 technical attendees and 2 - 5,000 total attendees.

A major topic of discussion of the SiA Steering Committee has been on ensuring that the standards of quality of SIGGRAPH will be met, especially for the Papers Program. The Papers Committee should have people from the SIGGRAPH Papers Committee and have others of similar quality. An advisory group has already been formed with people from the SIGGRAPH Papers Committee: Dinesh Manocha, Sing Bing Kang, and Tomoyuki Nishita (2005 Coons Award winner). For SIGGRAPH 2007 there were 108 papers accepted and the feeling was that there are many SIGGRAPH worthy papers extant and there is an increase in the amount of high quality research. A straw poll of the S2007 Papers Committee indicated that about 25% of the accepted papers were resubmissions. If SiA could accept some of these papers it would help offload the pressure for parallel sessions at SIGGRAPH.

Guidelines for SiA

The SIGGRAPH Conference has a well developed set of policies and procedures and a well structured process for its development. This is currently undergoing change, but SiA will use SIGGRAPH and the current and historical set of policies, procedures, and processes as guidelines for its development. John Finnegan, SIGGRAPH 2006 Conference Chair, was chosen as the first Associate Chair. The SiA CAG (defined below) will work with the SiA Conference Chair to advise them on budget, organizational, programmatic, and process issues as the CAG does with the SIGGRAPH Conference Chair.

A general set of recommended guidelines from the SiA Steering Committee and from other sources is given below.

Structural and Organizational Guidelines

• The SiA Conference Chair should be Asian and should be located in the host country. The reason for this is that it will be more difficult for someone not in that country to negotiate with local entities. This may be relaxed after SiA becomes more established, i. e., the second time it is held in a country the Chair may be from somewhere else.
• SiA is an International Conference with an International Program Committee. While the Program Committee will probably be primarily Asian, it should have people from other regions, just as SIGGRAPH has a Program Committee that is primarily from North America but has members from elsewhere.
• SiA will be treated the same as SIGGRAPH with respect to required approvals from the EC: host City/Country, Conference Chair, Preliminary and Final Budgets.
• The SiA Technical Chairs (Papers and Courses) will be approved by the EC.
• The content of the SiA will be published in a similar fashion to our other conferences. There will be a conference DVD-ROM and there may or may not be hardcopy proceedings. It will all be available in the ACM Digital Library.
  
• Each SiA will have a Conference Chair and an Associate Chair. The Associate Chair will be someone who has already been a SIGGRAPH or an SiA Conference Chair. The relation between the two should be similar to the SIGGRAPH relation between the Conference Chair and the CSE, i. e., while final decision making authority rests with the Conference Chair, the Associate Chair will work closely with them and advise them.
  
• An SiA CAG will be created that will have a structure similar to the current CAG, i.e., a set of Conference Chairs, an SiA CAG Chair, and representative(s) from the EC. As a start, the SiA CAG will consist of the following: Alyn Rockwood, YT Lee (SiA 200X Chair), John Finnegan (SiA 200X) Associate Chair, and Scott Owen - note that Scott Owen should be replaced by another member of the EC as soon as feasible. Either John Finnegan or Alyn Rockwood might be the temporary SiA CAG Chair.

Financial and Contractor Guidelines

• No contracts should be signed that have significant financial penalties. Since as SiA moves from country to country, at least for the first time in a country each SiA will have a relatively high risk factor. This is because there will be no history of how we might expect SiA to draw delegates or exhibits in that country. Therefore if SiA needs to be drastically reduced or even canceled there should not be significant financial loss to ACM SIGGRAPH.
• Some of the contractors may change with every SiA and there may be fewer multi-year contracts as compared to SIGGRAPH. This is because SiA will be held in different countries and the local contractors will be used. As much as possible, contractors that are familiar with and have offices in all the SiA cities and so can serve multiple years will be sought out. One of the great strengths of SIGGRAPH is the set of contractors who have worked on SIGGRAPH for many years and are very familiar with its structure, organization, culture, and with each other. We should strive to build a similar set of contractors for SiA so that it will also enjoy this advantage.
• If possible, SiA should use contractors that have strategic relationships with the SIGGRAPH contractors. This would be so the SiA contractors can learn from the experience of the SIGGRAPH contractors.
• Contractors will be chosen by the standard ACM Request for Proposal process which will be directed by the SiA CAG. The choice of contractor will be recommended by the SiA CAG and approved by the EC, as is done with SIGGRAPH. In order for a contract to be valid, the President of ACM SIGGRAPH must sign the contract. It may be possible, after approval of the preliminary SiA budget, for the SiA Conference Chair to choose contractors and sign contracts that are below a certain amount, e. g., $25,000USD. ACM and the EC will have to approve this.
  
• The Contributor Recognition (CR) policy of SiA should be similar to that of SIGGRAPH. It may not be exactly the same but we want to avoid the problem of SIGGRAPH and SiA having quite different CR policies such that contributors prefer one over the other because of what they receive. The SiA CR policy will be recommended by the SiA CAG and approved by the EC.
  
• The registration fee structure for SiA should be similar to SIGGRAPH. The SiA fee structure may be somewhat site specific since some cities may be much more expensive than others.
• If economically feasible, some SiA conferences may offer stipends to assist potential delegates from neighboring countries to attend. For Example, an SiA in Singapore might offer some stipends to partially support Malaysian and Indonesian delegates.
  
• The exhibition rate structure should be similar to SIGGRAPH but may vary from city to city as above.
• An SiA budget should include the following: 5% of expenses contingency, 7% of expenses ACM allocation, and 5% of income EC return.
  

The initial proposed set of programs includes papers, courses, trade exhibition, digital art (emerging technology), electronic theater, sketches and posters, and the educators program. Depending on the budget the size of these may change and some, e.g., emerging technology, may be eliminated. Again, depending upon budget there may be a few Special Sessions added.

Risks and Challenges

There are several risks and challenges associated with SiA. These can be divided into two categories: damage to the SIGGRAPH image and financial risks.

Financial Risks

There is the risk that SiA might lose a large amount of money and cut deeply into the ACM SIGGRAPH reserve fund. As noted above, one way to guard against this is that no contracts should be signed that have significant financial penalties in case we must decrease the size of or cancel SiA. In an email on March 27, 2007 Cindy Stark said that hotel attrition, which is always a big concern for SIGGRAPH, seemed to be mainly a U.S. issue, but she warned that we need to be aware of it when negotiating hotel contracts. Assuming this is true for Singapore, it eliminates another potential large loss area.

Stephen Sind, of Global Events Strategies, is currently doing a market study of possible exhibitors for SiA in Singapore and that will be added to this document when it is finished. Estimates of delegate registration will be based on similar events.

In 2006 BroadcastAsia "The International Digital Multimedia and Entertainment Exhibition and Conference" held in Singapore, drew over 14,000 attendees from 55 countries and 831 exhibitors from 47 countries. CGOverdrive 2006, held in Singapore attracted over 2,000 attendees.

There are risks of SiA competing with SIGGRAPH for registration and exhibitors.

Exhibits Competition

To assess the possible risk from current SIGGRAPH exhibitors deciding to exhibit only at SiA and not at SIGGRAPH, we asked Mike Weil of Hall-Erickson, the SIGGRAPH Exhibition Management company, to give us his opinion and also to ask some of our exhibitors about this. Below is the email we received from Mike on April 5, 2007.

Scott, 

I am not that concerned about losing major exhibitors to SiA and here is
why:

I believe that for the first few years the larger-scale and prestige of
SIGGRAPH will outweigh SiA. For example, we manage the American Library
Association (ALA) 25,000 attendees and the California Library
Association (CLA) 2,000 attendees. 

The people that attend the national ALA even from California want to be
at the flagship event that offers the Best of the Best. The people that
attend CLA from California usually can not get the funding or have the
clout at their library to attend the national event and thus go to the
local State event. 

The exhibitors that SIGGRAPH would be in danger of losing (IMO) would be
those from Asia that are LESS interested in the U.S. market but prefer
to target the Asian market. I count six companies (see attached) of out
of the 170-some that we have currently. In my opinion those six would
have to decide if the U.S. buyers are viable. 

I think SiA will do well as an additional event for those Asians that
may not have the clout or be able to afford to go to SIGGRAPH or can not
get enough of SIGGRAPH and want to go to a second conference, but I
don't see it as replacement (for too many). With that said - I can
touch-base with exhibitors to see if they may exhibit at SiA instead of
SIGGRAPH. 

Mike

Registration Competition

For SIGGRAPH 2006 there were 780 Full Conference (FC) registrations out of a total of 4,628 (just under 17%). In an absolute worst case scenario where every one of those went to SiA instead, that would represent a loss of about $600,000 (with an average cost of about $800). While this is highly unlikely, the amount of potential lost revenue to SIGGRAPH is unknown. At the February EC meeting in Seattle, Masa Inakage was asked about this for Japan, with by far the largest group - 479 FC registrations. His opinion was that those people would still come to SIGGRAPH but that the research labs would be able to send many more to an SiA conference since it would be cheaper.

It should be noted that Korea was second highest with 131 FC registrations while China had only 27 FC and India only 6 FC registrations.