As I bid farewell to the Executive Committee and my year as Chair, I find myself reflecting on what I have learned about SIGGRAPH’s history. Time that has flown by. It has been intense in many ways, requiring a great deal of thinking, questioning, consultation and debate. I have had a chance to share my contemplations: from the scale of our organizational activities, the fifty-year history of the SIGGRAPH conference, the state of our reserves, to how and where we fell short of our members’ expectations.
One of the stories I did not get to tell is about the origins of SIGGRAPH Asia. When I started my career in computer graphics, SIGGRAPH Asia was a new venue. I was dimly aware that it was being watched carefully, but I was a graduate student still finding my sea legs so to speak, and I never really asked anyone what that really meant.
In the past few months, I learned that in the early 2000s there was the GRAPHITE conference (sponsored by ACM SIGGRAPH) which was an international event on computer graphics and interactive techniques held in Australasia and Southeast Asia. GRAPHITE was organized by a group of professors from the area. At SIGGRAPH 2006, in Boston, a group of professors from this group, including Lee Yong Tsui (a.k.a. YT), met with Scott Owen (President, SIGGRAPH, at the time) and Alyn Rockwood (a.k.a., Rock, and Vice President at the time) and asked them to consider doing a full SIGGRAPH Conference in Asia, with Papers of course, but also Emerging Technology, Art, Education, and so on.
Rock and Scott discussed it. Scott formed an ad hoc committee (the President could do that then) with Rock as Chair and Scott was on the committee. Rock then recruited about 15 professors and practitioners from Asia, including people from Singapore (the original people we met with), Japan (Masa Inakage, most recently on the EC from 2021-2024), China, Taiwan, South Korea, India, Australia, and other countries. Because of the political situation at the time, this committee was careful to note that the people were not representing their country but were a group of people representing Asia. There was an email discussion, and they decided to meet at GRAPHITE 2006 (Chaired by YT), held in Kuala Lumpur in December 2006.
At that meeting it was decided that SA was an excellent idea to pursue as it would greatly expand the awareness of both Computer Graphics and ACM SIGGRAPH in Asia. At the time, the committee defined “Asia” as all countries between Japan and India and including Australia and New Zealand. By moving around to different countries, the hope was to expand our Chapters network and get more people in Asia involved.
(Scott’s note: I do not think we wrote an explicit mission statement, but it was implicit that we would try to ultimately have SA in as many countries as possible. We assumed that SA and the SACAG would evolve to primarily serve the Asian community but always with a strong non-Asia international component.)
After the meeting Rock and Scott commissioned two marketing studies to determine the financial feasibility of SA, and they were both positive. They knew there would be start-up costs, so they asked the EC to approve the project with a limit of about $1M, and they did. The fledgling conference could lose up to that amount but that was all, and then it would have to stop. They then sent out a request for proposals and received two – one from Singapore with YT as Chair (he later became the first Asian SACAG Chair) and one from Japan with Masa as Chair. The EC chose Singapore as the first conference and Japan as the second. Later the third conference was in Seoul, South Korea with Prof. Ko as Chair.
The three conferences were all run on the SIGGRAPH model with Koelnmesse (KM) as the primary contractor (the SIGGRAPH Asia version of SmithBucklin) and other local contractors. The conferences were successful in terms of the number of attendees and quality of the conference but all lost money. By the end of the third conference, the project had gone over its $1M limit. It almost converted to a papers only conference when KM offered a new financial model where they take the financial risk. This was not an easy sell to ACM headquarters as no other ACM SIG had or has a conference run on this model. However, ACM agreed to the arrangement, and it continues to be the only conference that runs on this model.
One critical point that I do recall from my own dim memory of the beginnings of SIGGRAPH Asia is the perception of the technical papers program. Because accepted papers would be published in ACM Trans. on Graphics (TOG), they were set up to be considered on par with SIGGRAPH papers. At the time, I did not realize the effort it took behind the scenes to make this happen. I learned that initially TOG agreed to accept only papers that their editors thought were of SIGGRAPH quality. If this meant no papers, then so be it. The first SIGGRAPH Asia papers committee under Kurt Akeley was told that the same standards that applied to SIGGRAPH also applied to SIGGRAPH Asia. Today there is no doubt that SIGGRAPH Asia on an equal footing to SIGGRAPH with regard to the quality of the research publications and the rigor of the review process.
Just as the pioneers who envisioned SIGGRAPH and SIGGRAPH Asia created new platforms for intellectual and community engagement, we too have an opportunity to redefine how we engage in publication, presentation, and interaction. As a practicing faculty member running an active research program in a publish-or-perish world, I am watching the landscape of publication and dissemination shift and change. What might we imagine? Restructuring the publication process to lean more heavily on year-round review and publication of work digitally? Switching out paper presentations in favor of doctoral consortium style presentations by senior graduate students on their best work? Focusing in-person interaction time on mentoring and community building activities?
Whatever the future brings, I look forward to being there with you.
Eakta Jain
Chair
Credits: This note was prepared using materials taken from email sent by Scott Owen and notes from Alyn Rockwood and Jessica Hodgins.