Chair’s Corner

Dear ACM SIGGRAPH Community,

It is with immense excitement and a deep sense of responsibility that I embrace the role of Executive Committee (EC) Chair for ACM SIGGRAPH. I am honored to lead this incredible community that I have been an active participant in for almost 30 years until my term as Chair ends 30 August, 2026 when our newly confirmed Chair-Elect, June Kim, will be taking over.

As I step into this position, I want to express my sincere gratitude to our outgoing Chair, Eakta Jain, for her dedicated leadership. I also extend my heartfelt thanks to the Executive Committee members who concluded their service this year, including Mona Kasra, Shimin Hu. and our dedicated Treasurer, Brad Lawrence, for their invaluable contributions to our organization. Their hard work has laid a foundation upon which we will continue to build.

I also recognize that I am entering a situation that requires immediate action to repair broken trust within our community. The Chair’s Corner is focused on a key example of that break in trust:  our handling of the dissent by members of our community in the choice of Kuala Lumpur for SIGGRAPH Asia 2026.

In December 2024, the site selection for the SIGGRAPH Asia 2026 conference was brought to the Executive Committee as an urgent matter to be resolved in the meeting.  We saw a brief presentation of the options with the recommendation by the SIGGRAPH Asia Conference Advisory Group (SACAG) for Kuala Lumpur as the location.  The vote was taken virtually due to time constraints in the EC meeting.  This is reflected in our public minutes of that meeting.

From then on, there was limited communication from the EC on the matter.  This was because, after learning of the concerns from the community, the EC was divided on how to respond. In hindsight, the choice not to respond at all in the face of a divided team was incorrect.

In the virtual Townhall held on 15 Sept after SIGGRAPH, this issue was discussed, along with a request to “release the May minutes!”.  That demand led us to realize that our EC meeting minutes had not been published since May due to a clerical error, which has now been addressed here.

That has led to two other actions:

• Summary of the EC’s deliberations regarding SIGGRAPH Asia. The public minutes do not indicate what we discussed and I have gotten permission from the EC members at that time to publish this overview of what happened “behind closed (virtual) doors”.
• Fulsome, public minutes published.  We have ended the practice of public and private minutes and will be publishing detailed discussions under Chatham House Rule.  You should see the difference starting with the minutes that have already been published during my term.  This practice will also guide our personal conversations as EC members to ensure we can engage freely with our colleagues and the community at large.

However, those efforts toward transparency are not enough.  We got into this situation because the decision was rushed and lacked specific guidance on how to make it.  With a third of the EC entering each year and an annually rotating Chair, clear programs of necessary activities and decision-making are essential to keep us running efficiently.

To that end, a key focus of my term as Chair is to create a comprehensive project plan, complete with lead times and preparation steps for all major decisions. This plan will be made publicly accessible, outlining the necessary inputs and timelines to ensure thoughtful consideration and avoid hasty actions. This proactive planning is essential to improving our effectiveness and ensuring decisions are not made under undue pressure.

Specifically, guidelines for conference site selection will be created, and details of each selected location with regard to those guidelines shall be made public.  There will always be trade-offs made in selecting the sites for our future conferences but awareness of those trade-offs should be a key part of sharing our decision with the community.  I would like to finalize these guidelines soon but have not received significant engagement from the community on them.  Thus, I am re-sharing the site selection guidelines here with a request to provide comments and suggestions by 31 Oct.  

Finally, I want to address our LGBTQ+ community.  I want to assure you that we celebrate and value the LGBTQ+ as part of the SIGGRAPH community, and you deserve to participate safely in our events without fear.

In discussions about our selection of Kuala Lumpur for SIGGRAPH Asia 2026, I used the term “feel unsafe” instead of “unsafe” to emphasize that your feelings about a location’s safety are more important than any specific law or advisory.  There are travel advisories advising against travel to Malaysia as well as those that state exercising normal caution. What ultimately matters most is your personal sense of safety.  There are clear laws that criminalize same-sex relations in Malaysia, while we have reliable reports of thriving LGBTQ+ communities within the country.  As such, I don’t think there is a clear line for safe or unsafe, except for how you feel.  That is what I meant by adding “feel” to my language, and I apologize for my wording and the harmful impact it had.

Further, I will say that if I were a transgender individual outside of Malaysia, and looking at the evidence, personally, I would not feel safe traveling to the conference.  That’s why I am thankful that our community has pulled together to identify alternative ways to participate in this and future SIGGRAPH and SIGGRAPH Asia conferences.

There is a lot more to come, but that is more than enough for a single update.  I truly look forward to connecting with everyone more directly and openly. Please feel free to message ec-chair@siggraph.org to reach both me and June Kim, our Chair-Elect, who will take over in less than a year. If you’d prefer to message me directly, darin_grant@siggraph.org also works. I thank those of you who have already reached out and participated in constructive dialogue.  Together, we can foster a more transparent, responsive, and trustworthy ACM SIGGRAPH.

Sincerely,

Darin Grant

ACM SIGGRAPH Executive Committee Chair (1 Sept 2025 – 30 August 2026)

Dear colleagues,

As many are aware, an open letter was sent to the Executive Committee (EC) expressing concern about the selection of Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia as the location for SIGGRAPH Asia 2026. The letter, and EC discussions, compelled me to think about site selection in ways I would not have done otherwise. It took me a long time to understand the different viewpoints, the nuances, and the complexities. My intention with this note is to let the SIGGRAPH community know that the open letter was taken seriously. My note is intended as a start, not an end. 

I want to start by thanking those who raised their voices. I hear the frustration, disappointment, and sense of exclusion that many have expressed. I recognize that our processes—particularly in terms of transparency and communication, and sensitivity to the concerns of LGBTQ+ members of the community—did not meet the expectations of members of our community. 

I would like you to know that the EC deliberated and cogitated for a long time on what ought to be done–what is the right thing to do at such a time? Switch to a different location? Set up a satellite venue? Provide hybrid options? As we peeled back layers, we discovered nuances and complexities, tensions and conflicts. Which is why this note is a start, not an end. 

So, if this is a start, what is the next step?

I believe that our mission is to nurture, champion and connect like-minded researchers and practitioners, but in a way that reflects our care for each other. The EC Chair and Chair-Elect are committed that this will stay on the EC’s radar, with some specific actions in the near term: we will engage with representatives of the community to advise us as we develop a checklist of considerations during site selection. These representatives will include chairs/representatives of our Standing Committees and Affinity Groups, including the Rainbow Affinity Group.  

The conversations that resulted from the open letter were not easy, nor are they over. But I am optimistic that they will make us a better organization and a more compassionate community. 

Eakta Jain

Chair

We celebrated 50 years of SIGGRAPH in 2023. In its heyday, SIGGRAPH drew almost 50,000 attendees. In our 51st year, we were back in Colorado, where it all began. Attendance was closer to 9000. Given this context, it behooves us to ask some hard questions. Where are we headed? Often, it helps to start by asking “where are we coming from?” I started by looking through our history archives.

The first conference in 1974 had only two types of content: papers and courses. The content was driven by scientific and engineering applications. Human input and interactive techniques were as important as techniques for measurement and representation. One title drew my attention: “Searching for Oil with an Interactive Graphic Terminal”. I appreciated the authenticity and excitement in the first line of the front matter posted by Rob Shiffman: “The conference was a smashing success.”

At this point, the conference was in a growth phase. By 1994, there were 25000 attendees, and in 1997, a record attendance: 48700! In 2004, we were down to approximately 28000 attendees, by 2014, we were down to 14000 attendees and in 2024, somewhere in the neighborhood of 9000 attendees. Graphing these numbers was sobering. In the year 2024, we are somewhere in between the attendee totals of 1980 and 1981 (Figure 1). Our exhibitor numbers are in the same ballpark too (Figure 2). I wondered, if we continue on this trajectory, in six years, will we be where we were in 1974?

That got me curious about the rest of the programs listed on the history archive. While the first conference in 1994 had only two programs, papers and courses, we have since added new programs in an almost linear fashion. In 2024, we had 26 programs listed on our website (Figure 3). These numbers are subject to debate – should Awards be counted as a program, for example – but the trend is clear. Now, I found my mind boggling. I tried listing all the programs we had on offer off the top of my head, and I could not. I asked a few others, just as a fun challenge, and they could not either.

I recently saw the film Koyaanisqatsi. An indie film made in 1982, the tagline said, “Life out of Balance”. The film has no dialogue or narration, only visuals set to a musical score. In the year 2000, it was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry in the Library of Congress. A visual from the film sprang into my mind: crowds of people walking briskly in various settings ranging from train stations to streets, no time to soak in the wonders of the world. I cannot convey in words what was so masterfully conveyed in that film. But I can ask: how could any of us find the time to enjoy even half of the programs we offer in the space of the annual conference? In a five-day conference, even if I try to catch two programs a day, that’s only ten programs that I can sample. And I call it sample for a reason – an attendee would only be able to catch two technical paper sessions in a half day of attending that particular program, for example.

And so, I found myself wondering again: Have we spread ourselves too thin? Is it time to go back to our roots? And if so, what are they?

As I prepared for the first Executive Committee (EC) meeting of the 2024-25 year, my first meeting as Chair, I found myself confronted by the breadth and scale of our activities as a Special Interest Group (SIG).

The overall organizational structure of the SIG is provided on our website. Standing committees are typically composed of a chair and volunteer committee members. Standing committees are grouped and each grouping has one or two EC directors as their liaison to the EC. The role of the liaison is to guide the standing committees on how to align their planned activities with the strategy set by the EC. Ad Hoc committees are typically new committees that are stood up in response to some need that was created by the EC overall strategy or as a result of an opportunity that was brought to the EC’s attention. Currently, we have three ad hoc committees: Design (led by Masa Inakage and Mona Kasra), Hybrid (led by Masa Inakage and Elizabeth Baron) and Volunteer Development (led by Mashhuda Glencross). At the end of the 3 year term, the EC may decide to renew an ad hoc committee, transition it to a standing committee or suspend it if the need has been fulfilled.

Our advisory groups oversee activities that are “standard” year to year. Their role is to ensure that the chair for the year is supported, that new programs are balanced with year-to-year continuity, and that decisions that need to be made on a multi-year time frame are made in a well-thought out way. The Conference Advisory Group (CAG), which oversees the SIGGRAPH Conference, and SIGGRAPH Asia Conference Advisory Group (SACAG), which oversees SIGGRAPH Asia, have somewhat of a special status in that these are the only two groups whose Chairs are appointed directors on the EC and have voting status. The Governance Advisory Board (GAB) also attends the EC meetings, but as a non-voting representative of the board. That leaves us with strategy groups. Strategy groups are created by the EC to help with big picture thinking. As an example, in the last few years, the Nurturing Communities strategy group advised the EC on the need for a Volunteer Development Committee and was instrumental in standing up this committee.

As I prepared for my first meeting, I counted 11 standing committees (+3 pending), 3 ad hoc committees, 6 advisory boards, 3 affinity groups and 1 strategy group. My mind boggled. At the very least, 23 individuals who were chairs of each of these units needed to interface with the EC. These individuals rotated in and out. When a chair stepped down, individual committee members had questions and concerns that needed to be addressed and a new chair had to be confirmed. Assigning liaisons itself is a complex optimization problem. We had new directors with their interests and expertise areas who did not necessarily have historical context. We had continuing directors who might wish to do the same thing as the previous year or change. Everyone was a volunteer working across time zones, day jobs and personal responsibilities. I found myself wondering, are we doing too much?

Eakta Jain