News

June Kim Tapped to Lead International Resources Committee in Inaugural Year as Standing Committee

by Melanie A. FarmerJ

The International Resources Committee (IRC), long a subcommittee of Communications, is now a standing committee in its own right. June Kim has taken on the role of Chair of the IRC. Kim is a longtime ACM SIGGRAPH member and volunteer based in Sydney, Australia, who started her stint as a student volunteer at SIGGRAPH Asia nine years ago. Most recently, Diana Arellano served as chair of the committee, but since last fall, has been leading the charge in ACM SIGGRAPH’s newly created external relations chair position.

“We are excited to have June lead the International Resources Committee, which, as a standing committee, will be working to extend our reach in the global community,” says ACM SIGGRAPH President Jessica Hodgins. “Diana, who has been working on forging new collaborations and partnerships in her external relations role, has been instrumental in developing the International Resources committee to where it stands today. We thank her for her dedication and we are thrilled for June to take on the reins.”

Kim has served on the International Resources Committee alongside Arellano for the past five years.  As the first order of business, Kim has been busy prioritizing near-term goals for the committee, which include kickstarting the organization of theater events for SIGGRAPH 2019 and bringing in new international activities to promote SIGGRAPH throughout the year. She also will be discussing with team members the IRC’s aim and mission for the coming months.

“I intend to have a number of open conversations with my team about purpose, goals and any ideas on improving our current services and new actions collectively,” says Kim. “Remaining collaborative and transparent is very important to me. And, in our first year being promoted as a standing committee, while it is exciting, I feel a big responsibility to establish new international activities that are meaningful and to come up with new ways that the IRC can effectively collaborate together with other SIGGRAPH groups.”

Kim, whose background is in interactive art and virtual reality, began volunteering as a student at SIGGRAPH Asia 2010 in Seoul. She recalls being “literally amused” witnessing all the latest technologies and contents in one place—the innovation at the exhibition halls, learning about research and practice during the in-depth presentations and getting to participate in the

computer animation festivals. “SIGGRAPH was eye-opening,” she says.

Kim is currently a researcher-practitioner in the Art and Design discipline at UNSW Art & Design and holds a casual academic position at UNSW Art & Design and the University of Sydney. Her expertise lies in melding interactive art and the virtual environment.  At ACM SIGGRAPH, Kim has held numerous roles, including as a member of VR/AR/MR Program Jury for SIGGRAPH 2018, SIGGRAPH Asia 2017 and 2018. She also served as a Juror and an Awards Chair for Emerging Technologies for SIGGRAPH Asia 2017 and 2018. She presented her course to introduce Processing for Artists & Designers at SIGGRAPH Asia 2017.

For Kim, SIGGRAPH has fueled her professional network but also holds personal significance, as she met her husband, Tomasz Bednarz, at SIGGRAPH 2014 in Vancouver. At the time, Bednarz had been serving on the International Resources Committee, and now he is the Conference Chair for SIGGRAPH Asia in Brisbane. “First thing we did together after getting married was work on the bidding to hold SIGGRAPH Asia in Brisbane, a city we first settled in together,” says Kim. “I cannot explain why but we are so attached to the spirit of SIGGRAPH.”

ACM SIGGRAPH’S NEW EXTERNAL RELATIONS CHAIR TO BUILD BRIDGES, FUEL COLLABORATIONS

by Melanie Farmer

ACM SIGGRAPH has named Diana Arellano Chair of External Relations, to strengthen ties and form new collaborations with organizations within the computer graphics community and with those communities that intersect with computer graphics. Arellano, whose connection to the SIGGRAPH conference began as a student volunteer in 2007, most recently served as International Resources Chair. She will assume her new role as External Relations Chair, effective immediately. “I am thrilled to have Diana take on this new leadership role as we get ready to really ramp up our efforts in external affairs,” says ACM SIGGRAPH President Jessica Hodgins. “Diana’s extensive experience as a SIGGRAPH volunteer and her collaborative mindset will greatly benefit our aim to create and build new partnerships outside of SIGGRAPH that will help grow our organization. As International Resources Chair for the past two years, she has worked successfully to build bridges between ACM SIGGRAPH and the computer graphics community around the world.” Forging new ties between ACM SIGGRAPH and the global CG community has been vital to the organization’s mission to continue to move forward and evolve. The focus on growth and new outcomes is what excites Arellano most about this new role. “As External Relations Chair, I will be able to help create real links and agreements between ACM SIGGRAPH and other organizations, conferences and companies that will benefit and help the growth of both parties,” she says. “Creating new contacts for the organization, brainstorming about effective ways to collaborate with other fields tangential to computer graphics and further represent ACM SIGGRAPH are what drew me to take on this new role. I am excited to get started!” Arellano will work to identify new communities interested in forging a collaboration in computer graphics; ideal sectors are areas that need the skills of researchers and practitioners in computer graphics such as artificial intelligence, data science, data visualization, simulation, robotics, and healthcare. In fact, the foundation for creating these links were set at SIGGRAPH 2018 in Vancouver, where workshops were organized centered on some of these topics. Arellano will begin forming a committee soon to help drive this mission and also intends to work closely with the New Communities Strategy team to help crystallize their ideas for new initiatives into a full-fledged collaborations. “I cannot wait to see what combinations of fields, geographical locations and needs for synergies we will come up with,” she adds, “and moreover, to start collaborating with other ACM SIGGRAPH members who are already working in this direction.” Arellano, whose research expertise is in affective computing combined with machine learning, works as software developer and team leader in the Pipeline Department at Mackevision Medien Design in Stuttgart, Germany, a leading company in 3D car visualization and VFX. Prior to chairing ACM SIGGRAPH’s International Resources Committee, she also volunteered as a member of the committee for six years. Additionally, Arellano co-organizes discussion panels on Women in CG and Visual Arts at FMX and SIGGRAPH.  

Press Release

LET’S DRAW!: NEW DEEP LEARNING TECHNIQUE FOR REALISTIC CARICATURE ART

Data-driven method leverages deep learning AI for photo-to-caricature translation

TOKYO, Japan, 16 October 2018 – Caricature portrait drawing is a distinct art form where artists sketch a person’s face in an exaggerated manner, most times to elicit humor. Automating this technique poses challenges due to the amount of intricate details and shapes involved and level of professional skills it takes to transform a person artistically from their real-life selves to a creatively exaggerated one.

A team of computer scientists from City University of Hong Kong and Microsoft, have developed an innovative deep learning-based approach to automatically generate the caricature of a given portrait, and to enable users to do so efficiently and realistically.

“Compared to traditional graphics-based methods which define hand-crafted rules, our novel approach leverages big data and machine learning to synthesize caricatures from thousands of examples drawn by professional artists,” says Kaidi Cao, lead author, who is currently a graduate student in computer science at Stanford University but conducted the work during his internship at Microsoft. “While existing style transfer methods have focused mainly on appearance style, our technique achieves both geometric exaggeration and appearance stylization involved in caricature drawing.”

The method enables users to automate caricatures of portraits, and can be applied to tasks such as creating caricatured avatars for social media, and designing cartoon characters. The technique also has potential applications in marketing, advertising and journalism.

Cao collaborated on the research with Jing Liao of City University of Hong Kong and Lu Yuan of Microsoft, and the three plans to present their work at SIGGRAPH Asia 2018 in Tokyo from 4 December to 7 December. The annual conference features the most respected technical and creative members in the field of computer graphics and interactive techniques, and showcases leading edge research in science, art, gaming and animation, among other sectors. 

In this work, the researchers turned to a well-known technique in machine learning, Generative Adversarial Network (GAN), for unpaired photo-to-caricature translation to generate caricatures that preserve the identity of the portrait. Called “CariGANs”, the computational framework precisely models geometric exaggeration in photos (shapes of faces, specific angles) and appearance stylization (look, feel, pencil strokes, shadowing) via two algorithms the researchers have labeled, CariGeoGAN and CariStyGAN.

CariGeoGAN only models the geometry-to-geometry mapping from face photos to caricatures and CariStyGAN transfers the style appearance from caricatures to face photos without any deformation to the geometry of the original image. The two networks are separately trained for each task so that the learning procedure is more robust, notes the researchers. The CariGANs framework enables users to control the exaggeration degree in geometric and appearance style by dragging slides or giving an example caricature.

Cao and collaborators conducted perceptual studies to evaluate their framework’s ability to generate caricatures of portraits that are easily recognizable and not overly distorted in shape and appearance style. For example, one study assessed how well the identity of an image is preserved using the CariGANs method in comparison to existing methods for translating caricature art. They demonstrated, through several examples, that existing methods resulted in unrecognizable caricature translation. Study participants found it too difficult to match the resulting caricatures with the original subjects because the end results were far too exaggerated or unclear. The researchers’ method successfully generated clearer, more accurate caricature depictions of portrait photos, as if they were hand drawn by a professional artist.

Currently, the focus of this work has centered on caricatures of people, primarily headshots or portraits. In future work, the researchers intend to explore beyond facial caricature generation into full body or more complex scenes. They are also interested in designing improved human-computer interaction (HCI) systems that would give users more freedom and user control on the machine learning-generated results.

For the authors’ paper, titled “CariGANs: Unpaired Photo-to-Caricature Translation”, and supplementary material, visit the team’s project page.

To register for SIGGRAPH Asia, and for more details of the event, visit http://sa2018.siggraph.org. For more information on the Technical Papers Program, click here.