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This week, we were greatly saddened to find out that longtime ACM SIGGRAPH volunteer Steve Cunningham passed away. Below is a tribute to Steve from ACM SIGGRAPH Communications Chair Barb Helfer. Steve will be sorely missed.

It is an honor to write this tribute to Steve Cunningham who was a friend, colleague, professor, scholar, author, husband, father, and a longtime supporter of the ACM SIGGRAPH and Eurographics communities. In whatever role we knew him, Steve stood apart as someone who was passionate about those in his path and the discipline of computer graphics!

I first met Steve when he was ACM SIGGRAPH Chair, and as a newly chosen member of the 1997 Conference team, he invited me to the ACM SIGGRAPH Executive Committee Meeting. Through that meeting and subsequent shepherding, he stirred my “service gene” and has made continual volunteering to the community a personal need. To Steve, computer graphics education and service to the community was not only his vocation, but his avocation as well, and this gift is reflected through dedication to the organizations he served and the many people he nurtured who are in service to the communities he supported.

Steve was chair of our organization, with Alain Chesnais as his vice chair from 1995 through 1999. Alain had the following to add, “Steve was my mentor and guide as I learned what it takes to prepare to become ACM SIGGRAPH President in 2002, then later ACM President in 2010. Steve taught me what it means to lead a uniquely diverse community in the most respectful and attentive manner — and why that is so important in a volunteer-based organization. I could never have been effective in my subsequent roles without Steve's thoughtful and insightful guidance. I learned it all while serving as his vice chair from 1995 through 1999."

Steve’s involvement in computer graphics began in 1976, when he received National Science Foundation funding to develop a graphics capability for teaching mathematics and statistics. Cunningham was a former chair of SIGGRAPH's Education Committee, 1983-90, where he was a significant contributor to development of the computer graphics curricula in computer science, and led and developed computer graphics education workshops for both the ACM SIGGRAPH and Eurographics communities. He was instrumental in creating an education directory and career handbook for computer graphics professionals. He was also a major contributor to SIGGRAPH's publications, where he created SIGGRAPH's first electronic publications and implemented other new publication technologies. He pioneered new publications, including the conference Visual Proceedings, and elevated smaller conference proceedings as mainstream publications. In 2004 he and soon to be wife, Judy Brown, were award the ACM SIGGRAPH Outstanding Service Award for their outstanding achievement in computer graphics and interactive techniques. For those of us who knew both Judy and Steve, it was fitting that they received the award together because so much of their dedication to the organization and the community was jointly shared and supported.

He served on the Eurographics Executive Committee and on the Eurographics Executive Board as Chair of the Education Board. In 1998 he was elected a Eurographics Fellow. He also served on the Board of ACM SIGCSE, the Special Interest Group on Computer Science Education and on the Board of Governors of the Mathematical Association of America. His interests were primarily in computer graphics education and computational science, and he wrote and spoke widely on education and other subjects. He co-authored or co-edited six books on graphics-related subjects. His latest book, co-authored in 2011 with Mike Bailey, was Graphic Shaders: Theory and Practice published by A K Peters, Ltd.

A graduate of Drury College with a BS in mathematics, Cunningham received an MS and PhD in mathematics from the University of Oregon and MS in computer science from Oregon State University. Steve served on the faculty of the University of Kansas, Birmingham-Southern College, and California State University Stanislaus where he was named the Gemperle Distinguished Professor of Computer Science. He was a Visiting Scientist at the San Diego Supercomputing Center and was a program director at the National Science Foundation's Division of Undergraduate Education from 2003-2005. His most recent academic position was as Noyce Visiting Professor at Grinnell College.

In addition to his devotion to his work and to the improvement of computer graphics education locally and globally, Steve always found time for his colleagues, his friends, and his family. Steve was a caring and beloved man, cherished by his friends and family. He will be missed by many, but never forgotten by those whom he mentored and were blessed to have known him.

The 14th International Conference on Computer-Aided Design and Computer Graphics (CAD/Graphics 2015) is currently accepting paper submissions, and will continue to do so until April 12, 2015 at 23:59 UTC/GMT.

CAD/Graphics 2015 is co-organized by the Northwestern Polytechnical University and Xi'an University of Posts and Telecommunications. The conference is affiliated with the Chinese Computer Federation (CCF), and is a biennial international that provides a worldwide forum for international researchers and developers to exchange new ideas on computer-aided design, computer graphics, electronic design automation and visualization.

CAD/Graphics 2015 will be held in Xi'an, China from August 26-28, 2015.

All regular full papers accepted to the conference will be published in a special section of the Elsevier journal Computers and Graphics (both SCI and EI indexed), before the conference. Other papers accepted will be published by Conference Publishing Services (CPS), included in the IEEE Digital Library, submitted for inclusion in IEEE Xplore and the CSDL, and submitted for indexing by EI. After the conference is complete, a number of accepted papers in the area of electronic design automation will be invited to submit to a special issue of the VLSI Journal Integration, published by Elsevier (both SCI and EI indexed).

CAD/Graphics 2015 solicits original submissions on theory and applications of computer aided design, computer graphics, electronic design automation and related disciplines. The topics include, but are not limited to:

• Geometric, Solid and Heterogeneous Modeling
• Rendering Techniques
• Computer Animation
• Image and Video Processing
• Computer Graphics Systems and Hardware
• Computer Graphics in Arts and Education
• Computer Theory and Engineering
• Scientific Computing and Visualization
• Information Visualization
• Image based Modeling and Rendering
• Computer Vision
• CAD Database, Data Exchange and Standards
• Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality
• Computer Human Interface
• Applications of Computational Geometry
• Integration of CAD/CAE/CAM
• 3D Printing
• Design Computing and AI in Design
• Computer Aided IC Design
• Reverse Engineering Process Planning and Assembly Design
• Computational Photography
• EDA: System-level Design
• EDA: Synthesis, Verification and Physical Design
• EDA: CAD for Manufacturability, Reliability and Test
• EDA: CAD for Circuits, Devices and Interconnect
• EDA: Bio-CAD and Nano-CAD.

For more information, or to submit your work, visit the CAD/Graphics 2015 website.

The ACM SIGGRAPH Digital Art Community (DAC) is now accepting submissions for their upcoming online exhibition, "Altered Books: Digital Interventions."

The exhibition is a celebration of the book as an object. An object that can carry experience, represent language, tell a story, convey culture and archive memory. The exhibition judges consider an "altered" book to be an artistic production made through the process of de-construction and re-construction of the book form. They are interested in "digital interventions" that result in still images of altered books which reference the legacy and symbolism of books, scrolls, manuscripts, and/or clay tablets.

Artists are encouraged to explore the merging of digital and analog, narrative and abstraction, 2D and 3D, or other creative digital interventions based on books. The is no fee to submit to the exhibition or participate (if selected), though each artist is limited to six submissions. All submissions are due by March 15.

For more information or to submit a work of art for consideration, visit the Altered Books: Digital Interventions call for submissions.

Many of us have watched informational visualizations about interesting scientific concepts without giving a second thought to how they were created — but, in reality, there is quite a lot that goes into the making of these often intricately detailed and functional works of art. Scientific visualizations present complicated topics in a digestible way, a process that often involves an entire production team, including the scientists themselves. The result is well worth the time and energy, especially if it means that more people are literate in the complex areas of research illuminated by these talented individuals. Cindy Starr is an advanced data visualizer at NASA Goddard Scientific Visualization Studio. Her job is to create imagery and animations that tell NASA’s story of exploration and discovery on Earth and beyond. After viewing some of the content she’s created and contributed to, we decided to ask her some questions about her work, her career, and the process behind creating such stunning visualizations. What led to your involvement with visualization at NASA? Have you always wanted to do it?

I first became interested in computer graphics in the 1980’s while working on my master’s degree at the University of British Columbia. After graduation, I took a position with the Earth and Space Science Computer Center at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. At that time, everything was primarily vector graphics, using graphics terminals attached to mainframe computers. Scientists used packages like NCAR Graphics to plot their data. I remember the day when they brought the first Silicon Graphics workstation into Goddard, opening up the possibility of high-resolution raster graphics for the first time. At that time, nobody knew how to program the SGI using the IRIS GL graphics language, so I was delighted to have the opportunity to do so.

How long does the process take to create a fully narrated piece, such as your recent work on Greenland?

Many participants contribute to developing a short produced piece like the one that we just completed about the age of the Greenland ice sheet. The primary person is the scientist, since it is essential that we accurately represent the data that he or she provides for us. Of equal importance is the media coordinator who brings a broad vision and direction to each project and arranges for the release. Other people often participate, including additional science advisors and visualizers. Each person brings a different perspective to the project, improving the final quality of the visualization by offering solutions that other team members might not have considered.

We usually start with the rough draft of a script that is created by either the media coordinator or the scientist. After a few rounds of email comments and corrections, the team meets on several occasions to discuss the storyboard and to work out the visuals to accompany the script. Often we need to create rough drafts of some visuals in order to see what ideas will work. We are actually portraying visual representations of arrays of floating point numbers (scientific data). Until you examine what the data looks like given the different treatments, you cannot determine what will work and what won’t. Sometimes we find that the script must be reorganized or revised in order to determine a visual sequence that best presents the story.

Most of the time required to create a produced visualization is not the animation time. Often, just developing a final script can take several months of lapse time. For example, we started work on the Greenland stratigraphy animation mentioned above in May of 2014 and the final visualization was released in January of 2015, but only about 2 months of that time was spent developing the actual animation.

What leads to the decision to actually create an animation for one subject, as opposed to another?

Issues related to which stories our team pursues are determined by NASA’s Office of Communications, managers of our studio and the science teams. We provide visuals primarily to groups that provide funding for our studio. Some groups sustain a full-time animator who works with their team. Those animators develop an expertise in the area and the data used by the science teams. Other animators work on a variety of projects. There is always a priority queue of projects waiting for an animator to be assigned. The visualizers are often given the choice between several of the projects that are among the studio’s top priorities. Of course the most coveted assignments are the ones with the most interesting science story, the best quality data and the longest lead-time. There is little opportunity for creativity when the animation is due within 6 – 8 hours! The challenge for every project is to do the best visual possible that the allocated time will allow.

Do you use “in-house” tools to create the visualizations, or are the things you use commercially available?

The primary tools that we use are commercial. We use Interactive Data Language (IDL) for much of our data preprocessing, and both AutoDesk’s MAYA and Pixar’s RenderMan for creating many of our visualizations. However, these commercial tools were designed primarily for animators in the entertainment business. We are grateful that they were built with enough flexibility to allow them to be customized for other purposes. In our studio, various team members have customized each one of these tools to meet the unique needs of our studio, sharing their customized tools with other team members. Some of these custom methods are simple and some are quite extensive. For example, we must correctly geo-referenced our data so team members have developed manifolds in RenderMan that accurately position data onto a globe, transforming the input data from a variety of different frequently used geographic projections. Other custom tools include a method for mapping data files based on a date keyframed in the scene and an extensive flow system that correctly propagates curves through 2 or 3D vector fields.

What’s the most difficult component of creating a full-fledged animation / visualization?

The primary challenge of creating a visualization is to develop a method that accurately represents the meaning evident to the scientist in the data. We need to translate the vision in his or her mind’s eye into a concrete image that people can understand. Sometime this can be accomplished by integrating data from a variety of sources. Other times a new visual treatment must be developed and refined. On some occasions we actually have to admit to the scientist that we are unable to present the data because we can find no visual representation to communicate what he/she understands from analysis of the data. Thankfully, this is a rare occurrence!

Do you have a favorite part of the process? If so, what is it?

My favorite part of the visualization process is in assisting the scientist in communicating their knowledge and insight to a general audience. Much of their work is highly technical and complex — far too difficult to present in the ordinary news media. I love working iteratively with the scientist, presenting their data in different forms until we identify a method that provides a clear and accurate representation of their results.

I also enjoy the collaborative environment in our studio and the camaraderie present among the team members. A visualizer always has access to the entire staff for solving problems, whether the problems are creative, scientific or technical. Internal reviews of projects in-progress usually yield great ideas that significantly improve the result. The feedback that I receive from my colleagues is invaluable.

Where do you see the future of visualization heading for NASA?

Visualization has become a primary means of communication at NASA, supporting outreach to others in science community as well as to news and social media outlets like where scientists often buy TikTok followers. With broadband widely available, HD resolution science visualizations are widely available on the web. In addition, one of the most successful formats on which to present data visualization is the hyperwall, where high resolution (e.g. 9600 x 3240) visualizations are played across many display screens. This has been a wonderful way for our scientists to communicate ideas and results at scientific meetings and conferences around the world.

How much freedom do you have when it comes to decisions for a project?

Each project is unique. The amount of freedom that the visualizer has depends on the team assembled for the project. For some small projects, the animator is working alone so no one else may really influence the final animation. Larger projects are a negotiation between the scientist, media coordinator and visualizer. We try hard to make certain that we do not generate any visual that could be misleading, but at the same time we want to satisfy the media coordinators and the science teams with the products that we create. Often, if we are able to show an alternative that is better than what they had first envisioned, they are more than happy to endorse the alternative.

Have you been particularly proud of any specific visualizations?

I have had the privilege to visualize some of the most significant research on the changes taking place on our planet, primarily related to the ice sheets of Greenland and Antarctica. The significance of this is not a reflection of my work but of all the scientists, engineers, managers and NASA mission team members that have enabled this research to take place.

Do you have any advice for those who want to pursue similar work?

I encourage anyone with a passion for science and an interest in visual communication to pursue an education in the field. Most of the visualizers in our group have advanced degrees in computer science, but some have PhD’s in a scientific discipline. Two team members also have MFA’s. Some combination of education in physical sciences and in computer science is a great background for pursuing a career in scientific visualization. In addition, a background in art is always an asset.

Visit NASA’s Scientific Visualization Studio for more information and videos.

Submission are now open for the Faculty-Submitted Student Work Exhibit at SIGGRAPH 2015 in Los Angeles. Sponsored by the ACM SIGGRAPH Education Committee, the exhibit will feature work from secondary (high school) students and university students. Submissions from all content areas are welcome, including art, animation, graphic design, game design, architecture, visualization and real-time rendering.

Educators are encouraged to take advantage of this unique opportunity to showcase their students' work at the annual meeting place for digital content companies, researchers and thousands of other computer graphics professionals. Images and videos will be exhibited at the Education Committee Booth at SIGGRAPH 2015, and later posted on the ACM SIGGRAPH Education Committee website.

To submit student project work for consideration, visit the Education Committee website.

Check out the student work and faculty projects featured in the SIGGRAPH 2014 Faculty-Submitted Student Work Exhibit.