Chair’s Corner

Dear ACM SIGGRAPH Community,

It has been a while since my last post, as we have been extremely busy on the SIGGRAPH Executive Committee. 

General Updates

First, I want to take this opportunity to also welcome our new Conference Advisory Group Chair, Erik Brunvand.  This appointed position is a significant commitment, as the CAG Chair is responsible for leading the team that ensures the success of our annual SIGGRAPH conference.  Which leads me to express my sincere gratitude to our outgoing CAG Chair, Mikki Rose. Mikki has been a member of the CAG for NINE years: the first three leading to her role as Conference Chair in 2019, and the last six years as Chair of the CAG.  Mikki exemplifies the level of commitment we are fortunate to have within our community, and we are fortunate to have had her service.

Following my last post on SIGGRAPH Asia’s 2026 location, I wanted to summarize the final steps we have taken based on feedback from our entire community.

1. We will be surveying our attendees about future conference locations.  We will use this as an early indicator for our attendees, not only of interest but also of potential concerns about locations.
2. We will share answers to the accessibility questions we solicited regarding transparency in future site selection.  While there will always be trade-offs in our location choices, we believe this transparency was a key gap in our process, and we are committed to providing it going forward.
3. We will not apply these guidelines to our specialized conferences.  We provide minimal oversight of these conferences, allowing them to operate in ways that best serve their respective parts of our larger community.  That said, all Specialized Conferences follow ACM guidelines and enforced by our Standing Committee Chair and liaisons to our Executive Committee.

November Executive Committee

Since my last post, we have held an intense and successful Executive Committee meeting (see below) and an incredibly successful SIGGRAPH Asia in Hong Kong, with over 6,000 attendees.  Congratulations to SIGGRAPH Asia 2025’s conference leadership on an excellent experience!

We hosted this EC meeting in Chicago and at the Smithbucklin Offices to reduce our costs.  I am very thankful to SB for hosting us.  As mentioned, we accomplished a lot in two days of being locked in a conference room.  It was a reminder of how valuable in-person experiences are for building community and why improving our site selection process is so important. Ensuring this community remains connected through our annual in-person conferences is essential to our organization’s health.

Details of our efforts are in our meeting notes, but I’ll summarize that our work was really divided into two main themes for the weekend:

1. Mission.  What is the mission of the EC, the Conference Advisory Groups, and the right levels of oversight for each?  We’ve confirmed that the EC’s priorities are to provide benefits to the membership year-round and to ensure the organization’s long-term sustainability.
2. Organizational Sustainability.  Our organization depends on financial solvency and volunteership.  Ensuring both were the focus of discussions ranging from the roles of Standing Committees, Advisory Boards, and Affinity Groups to multi-year expense control and revenue growth opportunities, to the officer structure for our organization.

This team of elected and appointed Executive Committee members has committed to doing the work to make us better, and you should expect to see some key changes before the end of my (too short) one-year term as the Chair of the organization.

Member Benefits

Since my last post, there has been some discontent raised around member benefits and accessibility under ACM Open.  ACM Open has been discussed for quite some time as an exciting step toward making our community’s work more accessible. Years of planning and effort culminated in a launch on January 1st, much to the excitement of our community.  Unfortunately, unexpected changes led to both private and public calls for change.  I’m grateful that ACM listened to this feedback and made immediate corrections, ensuring that, by providing open access to all content, our paying membership was not disadvantaged.

You’ll note that member benefits are a key responsibility of the Executive Committee, but we had limited discussion of them in our last in-person meeting.  What the organization can do to deliver greater value to our membership will be a primary focus of our meeting at the beginning of March. If you have suggestions, please feel free to share them with me at ec-chair@siggraph.org.

Speaking of our membership at large, I was fortunate to meet Ana and Felipe, the Chair and Vice Chair of our SIGGRAPH Bogota Chapter, while on vacation over the holidays.  They gave me a valuable perspective that I lacked on what it’s like to be part of this community while so far away from our conference locations and centers of leadership.  This, combined with meeting and speaking with many Asian Chapter leaders who attended SIGGRAPH Asia in Hong Kong, was a powerful reminder of the importance of our local chapters and further motivated me to focus on member benefits at the Executive Committee level.  I am looking forward to sharing our commitments in my next update.

Sincerely,

Darin Grant

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

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?