News

Early Career Development (S3)

The Student Services Committee provides continuity and institutional memory for the student volunteer and intern programs at SIGGRAPH and SIGGRAPH Asia to demonstrate the value of SIGGRAPH membership to student members. Read more

External Relations

The External Relations Committee establishes and oversees ACM SIGGRAPH’s agreements with numerous organizations and conferences around the world. This committee identifies and establishes relationships with new organizations according to the current strategic plan.

Lifelong Learning

The Lifelong Learning Committee develops online educational materials such as webinars, online courses (SIGGRAPH University), ACM Books and state of the art reports to support practitioners and other members wanting to expand their skills by learning about new areas. Read more

Research Career Development

The Research Career Development Committee plans, develops, and facilitates activities that support the career development of members with research careers in academia and industry. Read more

Specialized Conferences

ACM SIGGRAPH helps organize and sponsor focused conferences, workshops, and other symposia around the world on topics related to computer graphics and interactive techniques. These gatherings enable groups with specific interests to get together and exchange information. Read more

The Chair of a Standing Committee is responsible for the following:

1.  Recruiting, organizing and meeting with the Committee members
2. Acting as a liaison between their Committee and the Executive Committee (EC) to advise the EC and to ensure that the Committee’s activities are aligned with the strategic priorities of the EC.

• The Chair must submit a budget request to the Executive Committee every January.
• The Chair must submit an annual report to the Executive Committee every June.
• The Chair can expect to spend an average of 5 or more hours/week on the chair activities.

For those interested in applying for one of these positions, please contact the Nominations Chair, Thierry Frey. Only applicants who are ACM SIGGRAPH members in good standing as of the application deadline will be considered. Provide a CV and vision statement stating why you’re interested in being chair and what you hope to accomplish in this volunteer role. The Nominations Committee will review all the candidates, conduct interviews if necessary, and make recommendations to the ACM SIGGRAPH Executive Committee in order to approve the next chairs, according to the following schedule :

April 1 – April 30 – Call for nominations open 
May 1 – 15 – Review by the Nominations Committee
May 15 – Recommendation to the EC
June 1 – New chairs announced
Sept 1 – Term begins for 3 years

The ACM SIGGRAPH Nominating Committee has proposed the following candidates for the 2023 ACM SIGGRAPH election which will commence on 15 June 2023:

DIRECTOR A:

Mathieu Desbrun, Inria/X
Alla Sheffer, University of British Columbia

DIRECTOR B:
Elizabeth Baron, Unity Technologies
Marc Petit, Epic Games

DIRECTOR C:
Courtney Starrett, Texas A&M University
Victoria Szabo, Duke University

In accordance with the ACM SIGGRAPH Bylaws, additional candidates may be placed on the ballot by petition. All candidates must be ACM Professional Members as well as members of ACM SIGGRAPH. Anyone interested in petitioning must inform ACM Headquarters, Pat Ryan (ryanp@hq.acm.org), of their intent to petition by 5 April 2023. Petitions must be submitted to ACM Headquarters for verification by  18 April 2023.

The Nominating Committee
Thierry Frey, Chair
Dena DeBry
Jenny Dana
Arik Shamir
Larry Bafia
Scott Owen

SIGGRAPH’s success as a dynamic professional community is, in large part, due to the work of the dedicated volunteers who bring their experience and passion to the organization.  Eakta Jain, recently elected to the SIGGRAPH Executive Committee (EC), sees her new role as an opportunity to give back. “It reflects that my professional community trusts me to look out for SIGGRAPH and help steer it such that it continues to be vibrant in the years to come.”

Eakta first became interested in robotics in middle school, inspired by a television show that featured Kismet, the robot head made by Dr. Cynthia Breazeal at MIT as a machine that can recognize and simulate human emotions.  Eakta’s father, an electronics engineer and entrepreneur working in robotics and embedded systems, recognized his daughter’s fascination with the subject and encouraged Eakta to pursue her interest.  Her first job, while studying for her Bachelor of Technology in Electrical Engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology in Kanpur, was with her father’s company. Her work to conceptualize and execute a visual programming interface was unpaid – but provided Eakta with the invaluable experience of producing a tangible outcome to present for feedback. 

Eakta’s decision to pursue graduate studies Carnegie Mellon University was a result of photos of the “cool stuff” in the CMU robotics lab taken by her mother, a computer science teacher who also ran the school robotics club, during a professional development visit to CMU. 

Now an associate professor in the Department of Computer and Information Science and Engineering at the University of Florida, Eakta brings industry experience at Texas Instrument R&D Labs, Disney Research Pittsburgh and Walt Disney Animation Studios to her work as a researcher, teacher, academic supervisor and mentor.  She and her students explore topics at the intersection of graphics/VR and privacy/security, conducting research on mitigating privacy risks while enabling the generation of compelling virtual experiences and digital avatars.

When Eakta first started thinking about the concept of privacy, she was overwhelmed by the magnitude of the literature on the topic. A colleague introduced her to the writings of Helen Nissenbaum, professor of Information Science and founding director of the Digital Life Initiative at Cornell Tech in New York City.  Eakta has been inspired by Nissenbaum’s work on privacy, bias in digital systems, trust online, ethics in design, and accountability in computational and algorithmic systems and is intrigued by the influence of philosophy on computer science.

Eakta is excited about her new role as a member of SIGGRAPH Executive Committee, where, in addition to ensuring the organization’s sustainability setting its strategic direction and guiding new initiatives, she chairs the Nurturing Communities strategy group and serve as liaison to the EC for the Career Development group. She is especially interested in how the organization can provide a balance of online and in-person presence, with virtual offerings that reach a large, international audience and in-person events that cultivate and strengthen personal and professional networks.

Eakta notes that, in addition to the ongoing support and encouragement she received from her parents, she had great mentors and role models, including Jessica Hodgins and Nancy Pollard at CMU, Karen Liu at Georgia Tech and Marie-Paule Cani at Ecole Polytechnique. She continues in that tradition by having mentored more than 30 students during her eight-year tenure at the University of Florida. And, as a faculty member and mother of young children, Eakta understands that life is imperfect and so is she. “I have been often asked “how do you do it all” and I worry that this sentence perpetuates that fallacy because my life is not perfect, I don’t do it all, and indeed, no one can.  There are so many difficulties and imperfections in me that are not part of a profile and the most important thing that my awesome mentors did for me was to let me see their vulnerabilities and hardships that were not visible to me.”

When asked what advice she has for young women, Eakta says “I reframe this question to myself as “what would I tell my younger self?”. And, if I could go back in time, I would say “who you are is enough”. Many a time, I felt that I should be smarter, or cleverer, or more strong-willed or more decisive or any number of things different from who I am. Of course we all have things we need to work on and ways in which we will grow over time. But at any given moment in time, who you are is enough.”

With a father who worked in the field, a mother who taught computer science and nurtured interest in robotics in her students and a younger brother with a PhD in robotics, Eakta quips that she “joined the family business”.  And Eakta’s students, research colleagues and the SIGGRAPH community at large are fortunate to benefit from her expertise, experience and volunteer commitment.

Member Profile: Eakta Jain | ACM SIGGRAPH

Next in the ongoing series of panels from the SIGGRAPH Pioneers comes a discussion with some of the pioneering educators of the art and science of Computer Graphics. Moderator William Joel hosts a distinguished panel of long-time scholars of CGI and Interactive Techniques, including Edward Angel, Glenn Goldman, Don Greenberg, Barbara Mones, and Scott Owen.

Join us March 8, 2023 at 08:00 PM Eastern Time (US and Canada) for a webinar you won’t want to miss. Registration is required for attendance.

After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the webinar.