Introduction

The Papers program at SIGGRAPH 2005 is the premier venue for technical publications covering computer graphics and interactive techniques. For the scientist, engineer, or student, the Papers program is why they are attending SIGGRAPH.

The preeminent labs in computer graphics and interactive techniques present their research results during the Papers program. Having your publication appear in the Paper program is a guarantee that your research will be noticed - internationally.

This year's Papers program was chaired by Professor Markus Gross of ETH Zurich. This marked the first time that the Papers chair was based in Europe. In previous years, the Papers program chair was based in the United States. Professor Gross is quite proud of being the first to break this barrier especially in light of the fact of SIGGRAPH's importance internationally.

A total of 98 papers were selected by the Papers committee out of a pool of 461 submissions who made the January 26, 2005 deadline. The Papers program only accepted 20% of the submissions. The number of submissions and the selectivity of the committee is partial proof of the stature of this conference's Papers program.

Getting Your Paper Accepted

If you have never attended a paper session before, you may not have realized how important the Papers program is to the researchers in computer graphics and interactive techniques. For researchers, one can say that there are two kinds: those who have a SIGGRAPH paper and those who want a SIGGRAPH paper. You would be hard pressed to find any researcher who would dismiss the quality and stature of SIGGRAPH publications.

After having worked on your research for a year or two, you may be ready to submit to SIGGRAPH. In 1993, Jim Kajiya, that year's Papers program chair, wrote an article called How to Get Your SIGGRAPH Paper Rejected. Although the article is 13 years old, Prof. Gross said that it "still captures the very essence of the SIGGRAPH Papers program selection process". For budding researchers, the advice in the article is indispensable in ensuring that your paper has a fighting chance to make it past the Papers committee and into that year's proceedings.

This Years Paper Session

One can pick out a number of trends in this year's Paper session. The first is that photo-realistic lighting and shading are being driven by real-world sampling. That is, the realism in a droplet of water or a plume of smoke are from our ability to sample real world phenomenon in conjunction with physically based models in lieu of the models alone.

A second trend are the advances in picture and video processing. A number of papers presented novel solutions to problems faced by industry and home users of digital photography and video. For example, there are papers this year which addressed topics such as depth of field in digital photographs (in other words, correcting the focus after the fact), creating video panoramas, and removing the hot spot from flash photography.

The paper sessions started on Monday, August 1 running through Thursday, August 4. Many of the paper sessions ran in parallel, much to the chagrin of many conference attendees. The only thing anyone can do is prioritize what paper presentations are must-see and hope you don't miss anything at the other presentations.

This year, the Papers program were divided into the following categories (listed in alphabetical order): Appearance & Illumination Capturing Reality I & II Deformable Models Dynamics of Solids Fluid Simulation Geometry on GPUs Hardware Rendering Illustration and Image Based Modeling Image Processing Large Models & Large Displays Mesh Manipulation Meshes I & II Motion Capture Date: Interaction and Selection Perception Plants Precomputed Light Transport Ray Tracing Reprise of UIST and I3D Shape & Texture Skins & Faces Styles of Human Motion Texture Synthesis Transparency & Translucency Video & Image Matting

Prof. Gross commented on this year's Paper program during an interview he gave for the SIGGRAPH Reports website. He highlighted a number of papers such as Performance Relighting and Reflectance Transformation With Time-Multiplexed Illumination (Capturing Reality I), A Vortex Particle Method for Smoke, Water, and Explosions (Fluid Simulation), and RPU: A Programmable Ray Processing Unit for Realtime Ray Tracing (Hardware Rendering).

An interesting addition to this year's program was the UIST and I3D reprise session. At this session, highlights from these two conferences were re-presented at SIGGRAPH's Papers program. There has been some criticism of having a reprise session during SIGGRAPH's Papers program. The criticism has revolved around the merit of re-presenting papers that have already been published at a conference. Moreover, critics are concerned that more SIGGRAPH quality papers could have been presented during the conference. Others have responded to the criticism by expressing that re-presenting the highlights from these two conferences provides an invaluable opportunity to expose the research to a broader audience.

Conclusion

For computer graphics and interactive technique researchers, students, and engineers, the SIGGRAPH Papers program is a chance to get together to collectively geek-out at all the fascinating, cool and surprising work our community has been doing. Often we mistake the state of the art for the greatest and latest appearing at the SIGGRAPH Exhibition. This just isn't the case. The Papers program defines what the of the state of art is. The Papers program is your window to the future and where you'll find the next big thing.