ACM SIGGRAPH Chair and Chair-Elect Selected

The Executive Committee is pleased to announce the selection of the organization’s Chair and Chair Elect.

Mona Kasra is the new Chair of the Executive Committee. Kasra is a new media artist, interdisciplinary scholar, and Associate Professor of Digital Media Design at the University of Virginia. Her focus explores the confluence of media technologies, art, and culture; reflecting on the impact of emerging media on personal, political, and creative expression; and experimenting with the affordances of such media for artistic and performative practices. 

Eakta Jain, Associate Professor in the Department of Computer and Information Science and Engineering at the University of Florida was selected as Chair Election.  Professor Jain received her Ph.D. and M.S. degrees in Robotics from Carnegie Mellon University and her B.Tech. degree from IIT Kanpur.  She has industry experience at Texas Instruments R&D Labs, Disney Research Pittsburgh and Walt Disney Animation Studios. Mona Kasra and Eakta Jain join David Spoelstra and Brad Lawrence as Officers of the SIGGRAPH Executive Committee.

ACM SIGGRAPH 2023 Election Results

ACM SIGGRAPH presents the results of the 2023 elections to the organization’s Executive Committee.

Elizabeth Baron, a Solutions Executive at Unity Technologies, was elected to her second term as Director.  Elizabeth works on solutions for the industrial design, engineering and manufacturing space, to powers creation at all points in the product development process. Formerly, Elizabeth was a Technical Specialist in Immersive Realities at Ford Motor Company. She is the principal inventor of the Ford immersive Vehicle Environment (FiVE) process and technology, an immersive environment with high realism in experience, providing contextual data and real time global immersion for multiple disciplines across Ford.

Alla Sheffer is Professor of Computer Science at the University of British Columbia and a Scholar at Amazon Inc. Professor Sheffer received her BSc (1991), MSc (1995), and PhD (2000) from Hebrew University, Jerusalem, Israel. She investigates algorithms for geometry processing, focusing on fabrication and computer graphics applications. Sheffer is a Fellow of IEEE, a Fellow of ACM, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, a Fellow of Eurographics, and a Member of the SIGGRAPH Academy. She is the recipient of the 2018 Canadian Human Computer Communications Society Achievement Award; a UBC Killam Research Award; multiple faculty awards from Adobe, Google and IBM; an NSERC Discovery Accelerator award; and an Audi Production Award.

Courtney Starrett is an interdisciplinary artist and Associate Professor in the Visualization Program in the new School of Performance, Visualization & Fine Arts at Texas A&M University. She is a founding member and associate director of the VIVID Lab (Visceral Intersensory Visualization & Information Design) of the Texas A&M Data Science Institute and a faculty affiliate of the HCIED (Human-Computer Interaction and Engineering Design Lab). Courtney holds the Harold Adams Interdisciplinary endowed professorship and is currently the director of the MS and MFA in Visualization graduate programs. Her creative research focuses on data materialization, using data as raw material, and integrating digital fabrication technologies in craft practices.

Women of Influence: Pioneers & Change Makers

Join us as the Women of SIGGRAPH Conversations hosts part 2 of the panel discussion Women of Influence: Pioneers and Change makers, a conversation with some of the women who shaped SIGGRAPH and the computer graphics industry and community — and who are blazing new trails.

Panelists include:

This conversation was sponsored by AUTODESK and Foundry.

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The SIGGRAPH 2023 Practitioners Sessions

Discuss Best Practices for Professional Development and Career Growth at the SIGGRAPH 2023 Practitioners Sessions

No one is ever born brilliant at their job. Behind every successful person is years of experience, learnings, and reflections that help them continually build a career that best bridges the gap between what they want to do and who they want to be. With information now within a keyboard’s reach, it has never been easier to pursue professional self-education on one’s terms. At the same time, the rise of automation, fluid job markets and a continued evolution of technologies and best practices means that a professional career is a continuous learning journey rather than the outcome of a single qualification.

It can often be difficult to find the right direction for one’s continued career growth. Whether you are just starting out in a new role, are an experienced professional looking to contribute value to your team, or are looking to reskill for a different role and/or industry, few qualities have the same impact on your trajectory as your own understanding of what balance of skills and best practices work best for you. Everyone has their own definition of professional success, and knowing yours allows you to make more meaningful contributions, affect change, and find better ways to manage your time for your professional work, your personal life and everything in between.

To this end, ACM SIGGRAPH would like to invite you to the first ACM SIGGRAPH Practitioners Sessions at SIGGRAPH 2023 focusing on career growth in computer graphics and interactive techniques. The ACM SIGGRAPH Practitioners Sessions are an in-person sessions for practitioners at the conference to have open discussions, with like-minded peers, on professional development in our industries, including but not limited to different approaches to creating and scoping engineering projects, developing tech stacks, identifying opportunities for taking research to practice and the productization journey thereof, and finding better ways to balance and support your and your team’s needs in between. These sessions are organized by the ACM SIGGRAPH Practitioner Career Development Committee (PCDC), a standing of committee of ACM SIGGRAPH whose directive is to plan, develop, and facilitate activities that support the career development of computer graphics and interactive techniques practitioners across different industries worldwide.

The ACM SIGGRAPH Practitioners Sessions will be held on Tuesday to Thursday, August 8-10, 2023, at the ACM Village Theater (West Hall 501, Los Angeles Convention Center). The sessions are open to everyone with a SIGGRAPH Conference Pass.

We believe that the ACM SIGGRAPH Practitioners Sessions is a small step towards having open community discussions on skills and best practices that, alongside the organization’s commitment to technical skills development, is necessary to building a well-rounded professional career in computer graphics and interactive techniques. We look forward to seeing you and having these conversations in person at this year’s conference, and are always open to feedback on how we can do better or more in the future.

Sincerely,
Juan Miguel de Joya
ACM SIGGRAPH Practitioner Career Development Committee Chair
Autodesk Consulting Media & Entertainment

The ACM SIGGRAPH Practitioner Sessions

Program Details

ACM SIGGRAPH Practitioners: Skills You Need to Step Up!
Tuesday, August 8, 2023, 10:00AM – 12:00NN PST
ACM SIGGRAPH Theater, West Hall 501, Los Angeles Convention Center
More details on our website
Find us on the conference program

ACM SIGGRAPH Practitioners: Research to Practice: Getting There and Back Again
Wednesday, August 9, 2023, 10:00AM – 12:00NN PST
ACM SIGGRAPH Theater, West Hall 501, Los Angeles Convention Center
More details on our website
Find us on the conference program

ACM SIGGRAPH Practitioners Town Hall
Wednesday, August 9, 2023, 10:00AM – 12:00NN PST
ACM SIGGRAPH Theater, West Hall 501, Los Angeles Convention Center
More details on our website
Find us on the conference program

Featured Speakers (at time of writing)

Ken Museth
Senior Director, Simulation Technology, NVIDIA
Recipient of the ACM SIGGRAPH 2023 Practitioner Award

Peter Crossley
Director of Engineering, Nuke

Mark Elendt
Mathematician, SideFX Software

Eric Haines
Distinguished Engineer, NVIDIA

Pete Shirley
Vice President, Graphics, Activision

Dan Ring
Head of Research, Foundry

Orly Liba
Staff Research Scientist, YouTube

Per Christensen
Principal Scientist, Pixar’s RenderMan Group

Frederic Servant
Director of Engineering, Entertainment & Media Solutions, Autodesk

Patrick Cozzi
CEO, Cesium

Computer Graphics Chronicles

As SIGGRAPH celebrates the 50th anniversary of the annual conference with SIGGRAPH 2023, we are pleased to present a series of conversations with the people who built the field of computer graphics.

Watch the Computer Graphics Chronicles playlist to hear about the personal and professional journeys of pioneers Jim Blinn, Turner Whitted, Marceli Wein, Sara Bly, Maureen Stone, Mary Whitton, Nick England, Ingrid Carlbom, Dave Kasik and Copper Giloth.  You’ll learn how they got their start, who their role models and mentors were and how they participated in the creation and development of computer graphics over the last five decades.