Dear ACM SIGGRAPH Community,
There has been a surprisingly large amount of activity since my last update in January. From the resignation of one of your elected Executive Committee members to a constructive full weekend Executive Committee meeting in Santa Clara, there is a lot to discuss!
Pathways to Meaningful Reform
Immediately following the 10 February 2026 EC Committee meeting (minutes available here), we received an email from Hugues Hoppe resigning from his post. He has chosen to publish this publicly on his personal blog here. I have a great amount of respect for Hugues’ contributions to our industry and do not wish to engage in public debate of his assessment. However, I disagree with his opinion that there is “no path forward toward meaningful reform.”
Non-profit organizations are intentionally bureaucratic, and ACM SIGGRAPH is no exception. Changes to the operations of these organizations can take time and, while some changes require membership voting (see “Officer Terms” below), the changes Hugues discussed regarding the organization’s expense allocation do not. And, in particular, the changes made to the conference budget are primarily the responsibility of the Conference Advisory Group (CAG). The CAG is composed of former and future Conference Chairs, representatives of the EC, and appointed members of the community (including Sylvain Paris!) to ensure consistency and informed decision-making as a part of their remit. The CAG provides this support in two major ways:
- Conference Chair onboarding. We have a new Conference Chair each year, and an advisory board that can provide guidance on “how it’s done,” which helps prevent large-scale changes that could jeopardize the conference.
- Executive Committee balance. While the EC ultimately has fiscal responsibility for the organization, the rotating set of elected volunteers often lacks the time to focus on specific Conference issues and direct Conference Chair experience (though our current EC is blessed to have six previous SIGGRAPH and SIGGRAPH Asia Chairs among its ranks).
The CAG thus ensures consistency in a rotating volunteer-led conference. And while consistency is good, it can make it difficult to make dramatic changes to the conference due to the natural inertia of legacy. This is exactly why the charts shared by my predecessor show an increase in programs despite decreases in attendance and exhibitors.
Since joining the EC 1.5 years ago, we have been focused on reducing costs. The SIGGRAPH Conference has lost money for the last two years, and the EC has aggressively looked to reduce the loss to the overall organization through two efforts. First, we have reduced our budget by over 30% outside of the conference across all non-conference-related costs. Second, despite being hosted in Los Angeles this year, we have required the CAG to produce a conference budget assuming significantly less income. Those immediate adjustments have given us the best chance to stop loss as well as giving headroom to re-add last-minute items to the conference (like coffee breaks) should things go better than anticipated.
And while those adjustments are immediate, there are greater ones to make. The single best way to shift conference expenses to the areas Hugues was interested in is to reduce the number of programs. Each program has operational, logistical, and administrative costs for the conference that require additional volunteers, equipment, or space, as well as additional contractor spend. Understanding roughly how expenses break down across programs was a focus of our November EC meeting, and combined with approaches to understand the value of those programs to our attendees, was a focus of our recent EC meeting. The combination of these two signals will provide clear, data-driven targets for program reduction going forward, which should allow us to reduce the operational spend on our contractors to match their reduced scope.
That’s a long way of saying: we have made progress to the point that we are confident we have stopped tapping our organization’s reserve, and we are positioned to look at more targeted adjustments to the conference to improve the attendee experience after this year’s conference in July.
Call for Appointed EC Director
With Hugues’ departure, we have a position to fill until the end of his term in August of 2027. Unlike the other roles we will advertise and vote on for a three-year term this summer, this role is appointed by the EC. However, we would like your help. We would prefer to have someone from the research community fill Hugues’ term, as the EC purposefully selects candidates from all parts of our community (research, practitioners, arts, and education). While we have a number of amazing researchers on the EC now, this role was intentionally geared toward our core research community. If you are a researcher interested in filling out an 18-month term on the EC, please email me at ec-chair@siggraph.org.
Industry Relations
A key factor in the health of our conference is its topicality and industry relevance. While the conference has long benefited from the rise of computer graphics in media and entertainment, it is clear that the future of our conference requires a focus well beyond Hollywood. The biggest industry partners are focused on the broader topic of visual computing applied to both digital and physical worlds. Overwhelmingly, a key factor for our industry partners has been a lack of consistency over years, conferences, and the various organization entry points in establishing long-term partnerships. While we have just scratched the surface here, there is a clear need for a consistent Industry Relationship component at the organizational level to enable a consistent, multi-conference partnership.
Member Benefits
As mentioned, our other focus for our onsite meeting was on Member Benefits. This is a long-standing and, with a rotating EC membership, a semi-annual discussion point. Ultimately, this starts with identifying who we are and what our values are. While this may feel redundant with our charter, the fact that our charter is focused on CG&IT reflects its age. The EC spent a significant amount of time discussing and debating how we should identify our organization and, by extension, our membership. Establishing this basis was helpful in determining who and what we should focus on for our members.
We would like to increase the value of and increase the number of members in SIGGRAPH. Most of us are members because of the discount we receive on conference attendance. But to grow our membership, we need to go beyond that. We have until our next in-person meeting to establish those targets.
Officer Terms
One last thing. When you get your ballots this summer to vote for new EC Directors, you will see a bylaws change to approve as well. A number of years ago, we changed from a three-year term as President of ACM SIGGRAPH to an annually rotating Chair of the Executive Committee as determined by the EC Directors. The reasoning was clear: at the time, the EC’s work was very top-heavy toward the President, and it was hard to convince people to do it for three years. Having experienced the role as Chair Elect and now Chair, and having spoken with every past EC Chair since the change, as well as other SIG Leaders and ACM, I believe the noble experiment did not achieve its goal.
Much like the Conference Chair described above, this role requires extensive onboarding. “I was finally fi guring the role out by the time I exited it” was the phrase that I heard repeated by past chairs. Given that, you will see a bylaws change to establish an EC Director position specifically for the three officer roles in the future: Chair, Vice-Chair, and Treasurer. I believe it is important that these roles are specifically elected (not all people who are great for the Executive Committee would be great Officers) and that they are multi-year, allowing folks enough time to make meaningful reform.
Sincerely,
Darin Grant
ACM SIGGRAPH Executive Committee Chair (1 Sept 2025 – 30 August 2026)
