Peter Schröder

Candidate for Director at Large

My first visit to the annual SIGGRAPH conference in 1984 left such an amazing impression that I started taking classes and eventually enrolled full time in an academic program to study the mathematics and computer science necessary to advance the state of the art in computer graphics research. Today I am a colleague to one of the teachers in that first SIGGRAPH course I took in 1984. Since then SIGGRAPH as a community, and the conference as its yearly showcase, have grown tremendously and increased in scope and breadth as few would have predicted. Today we have an amazing number of venues from art to education to the technical program. Simultaneously the community as a whole has grown to encompass entire industries. SIGGRAPH has seen giddy days when resources seemed limitless. In recent years we had to adjust to leaner times.

As a member of the technical community I am seeking the Director at Large position to help guide the continued development of the technical contributions side of SIGGRAPH, the organization, and SIGGRAPH, the conference. This ranges from state of the art courses, the main technical program (and its components such as sketches, etc.), the many, more specialized, symposia that SIGGRAPH (co-)sponsors, to publication venues such as TOG, and extends to international cooperation such as the one with Eurographics. With limited resources, where should SIGGRAPH allocate them? How do we sustain and nurture the very capital of our industry: research innovation? How can we take some of the insane pressure out of the publishing process while maintaining the high level of quality SIGGRAPH has established?

In consultation with the community at large I intend to bring forward initiatives that ensure the long term health and commitment to quality of the technical side of SIGGRAPH and to be a voice for the technical community as SIGGRAPH grapples with resource constraints, finding the best balance for the overall vibrancy and continued success of our community.

SIGGRAPH conference involvement:

• Participant, 1984-2007
• Courses (co-)organizer 1996, 1998, 1999, 2000, 2005, 2006
• Paper contributor, 1993-2003, 2006
• Art show, 1991
• Emerging technologies contributor, 1999
• Courses committee, 2003-2006
• Sketches & Posters committee, 2007

Honors and Awards:

• Humboldt Foundation Forschungspreis, 2006
• ACM/SIGGRAPH Computer Graphics Achievement Award, 2003
• Discover Magazine Innovator Finalist Award, 2001
• Packard Fellowship, 1998
• Okawa Foundation Grant, 1997
• IBM partnership award, 1997
• Sloan Fellowship, 1996
• NSF CAREER award, 1996

Education: 

• Princeton University, Princeton, NJ; PhD in Computer Science, 1994
• Princeton University, Princeton, NJ; MA in Computer Science, 1992
• Media Laboratory, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge,
• Massachusetts; MS (undesignated), 1990
• Technical University of Berlin, Berlin, Germany; Vor-Diplom, Computer
• Science and Pure Math, 1987

Employment:

• California Institute of Technology, Computer Sciences Department,
• Assist. Prof., Fall 1995 to Spring 1998; Assoc. Prof., Summer 1998 to
• Spring 2001; Applied & Computational Mathematics Department, Assoc.
• Prof., Spring 2001; Professor of Computer Science and Applied &
• Computational Mathematics, Spring 2001 to present
• Bell Labs, Mathematical Sciences Department, visiting member of
• technical staff, Summer 2000 to Spring 2001
• Interval Research, Palo Alto, CA; Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Summer 1995
• University of South Carolina, Department of Mathematics; Postdoctoral
• Research Fellow, Fall 1994 to Summer 1995
• German National Center for Computer Science Research (GMD), Sankt
• Augustin, Germany; Visiting Research Fellow, 1992 to 1994