SIGGRAPH Annual Report

July 1998 - June 1999
Submitted by: Steve Cunningham, Outgoing Chair

Summary

The past year was again quite successful for SIGGRAPH. The SIGGRAPH 98 conference - our 25th annual conference - maintained its place as the world's premier event in our field; we re-examined our educational work to prepare for a fresh start in many areas; our Chapters program continued a very active program of local activities; our public policy activities were active; and we began a number of projects that will bear fruit in FY2K. The world continues to look to SIGGRAPH as the primary source of information on computer graphics and interactive techniques.

SIG Management

SIGGRAPH has a tremendous diversity of operations and activities. In order to help us manage the complexity of our work we developed a statement of goals to help us chart directions for our strategic development. In terms of volunteer leadership, Jack Bresenham resigned as Director for Education in 1998 for health reasons, and Mike McGrath was appointed in his place. The 1999 elections saw Judy Brown elected as Chair, Alan Chalmers as Vice Chair, and Garry Paxinos elected as Treasurer, and they will be valuable additions to our Executive Committee.

Program Plan

The SIGGRAPH Program Plan continues to refer to our 1994 Snowbird strategic planning workshop, but it is time that this work was revisited and renewed. The areas identified by that workshop that continue to be active are:

Online services
We have found that much of our Web site has become dated, and that we need to create a better information architecture and work on our content. We believe that appropriately-focused online content can become an important member benefit and attraction.
Small conferences and workshops
Our small conference program continues to be very strong.
Education
We have renewed our educational work as described below.
Public policy
Our Public Policy area continues to be active.

All these activities are described in more detail below.

The other questions of conference content, organizational structure, and relationship with ACM are currently inactive, and it is becoming increasingly clear that we are overdue for a major thrust in membership marketing. The relationship with ACM will probably not be revisited until the question of Societies is addressed by ACM and the SGB.

SIGGRAPH 30TH Celebration

SIGGRAPH reaches its 30th birthday as an organization, and in FY99 we developed several activities to celebrate this fact. There will be an exhibition at SIGGRAPH 99 that showcases the organization and looks to future of SIGGRAPH and of computer graphics. The art exhibition from this event will travel during 1999-2000. A key project in the 30th celebration was our co-sponsorship with Eurographics of the Graphics and Visualization Education (GVE '99). While this was held in early July, 1999, and will be described more fully next year, the development of the workshop cemented our growing cooperation with Eurographics in the education area.

Financial

SIGGRAPH had a solid financial return from the SIGGRAPH 97 conference and met our anticipated income from other sources. Our reserves continue to exceed mandated levels significantly. Both the conference and the organization continue to operate within our approved budgets.

We have developed a budgeting process that provides our many activity areas with the opportunity to present their budget requests along with their program plans. This process needs to be developed futher, but could offer us a sound basis for developing long-range program planning and evaluations.

Annual Conference

SIGGRAPH 98, held July 19-24 in Orlando, was both a technical and financial success. Attendance was strong for a non-West Coast conference, with over 6000 technical registrations and over 32,000 overall attendance, and with 327 exhibitors taking over 170,000 square feet of exhibit space. A highlight of the conference was the celebration of SIGGRAPH's 25th annual conference, and a number of activities and presentations were focused on that theme. Our thanks go to Walt Bransford, Dino Schweitzer, Betsy Johnsmiller, and the SIGGRAPH 98 conference committee for their excellent work in developing the conference.

The conference continues its strong technical program, the world's best. The Papers and Sketches programs contained the latest advances in graphics research and development. The Emerging Technologies are emphasized human-centered computing in which the computer comes out of the box to interact (sometimes) invisibly with the user. Innovations included the Interactive Dance Club, a venue with state-of-the-art interaction technology tied to computer-controlled imagery, lighting, and music. The ongoing panels and educators programs, art exhibition, and animation program continue to highlight the current technical, creative, and controversial issues in our field. During 1998-99, the SIGGRAPH animation theater has become one of the qualifying festivals for the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, and short animations on film that win a Best of Show award in one of several categories will be elegible for consideration for the Academy Award (the Oscar) for short animations.

This year we reviewed and modified our conference management model, and we are confident that this model will continue to provide the annual conference with the strong volunteer leadership and the high-quality specialized services we need to ensure its success.

Additional Conferences

SIGGRAPH sponsors, co-sponsors, or is in cooperation with many other conferences, and the co-sponsoring relationship with the traditionally strong Eurographics workshop program continues to be very successful.

Sponsored:

ACM Symposium on Solid Modeling and Applications
1999 Symposium on Interactive 3D Graphics
Workshop on Rendering, Perception, and Measurement
Fourth International Conference on the Virtual Reality Modeling Language and Web 3D Technologies '99

Co-Sponsored:

1999 Siggraph/Eurographics Workshop on Graphics Hardware (Eurographics)
15th Symposium on Computational Geometry (SIGACT)
AGENTS '99 (SIGART, SIGCHI)
UIST '98: Eleventh Annual Symposium on User Interface and Software Technology (SIGCHI)
ACM Symposium on Virtual Reality Software and Technology 1998 (SIGGCHI)
IEEE/ACM Volume Visualization Symposium (IEEE-CS)
The 6th ACM International Multimedia Conference (SIGCOMM, SIGMM)

In Cooperation

Shape Modeling International '99 (Eurographics, Computer Graphics Society)
Digital Media World (Eurographics)
IWAR '98: First International Workshop on Augmented Reality (Rockwell Science Center, IEEE CS, Eurographics, Fraunhofer, Boeing)
Pacific Graphics '98 (Nat'l U.Singapore; Comp. Graphic Soc.; Info.Processing Society of Japan, IEEE CS; Kor. Comp. Graphics Soc, Kor. Info. Sci.)
IEEE Visualization 98 (IEEE-CS)

Publications

SIGGRAPH's print and electronic publications continue to provide information to the computer graphics community and documentation of the content of our conferences and workshops. In 1998 we developed a book of seminal papers in computer graphics as part of the celebration of SIGGRAPH's 25th annual conference; this has been very well received. We have made major overhauls of our online computer graphics database and our online publications area. We are also developing our first DVD-based electronic publication, and have started on a project to digitize all our back issues of conference proceedings in high-quality format.

Our Member Value Plus program continues to bring technical publications from other conferences and workshops to the SIGGRAPH membership, including proceedings from conferences not sponsored by SIGGRAPH but brought to the SIGGRAPH membership for their valuable content.

Membership

Our membership continues to decline at a frankly alarming rate. We have lost over 8% of our membership in the last year, and unlike previous years, the decline is stronger in our Lite memberships than our regular membershipe. The change in the affiliate membership program did not have the effect we had hoped, and we must consider mounting a serious membership marketing effort and look carefully at ACM and SIG policies that affect membership. Detailed membership numbers are online at http://www.acm.org/sigs/membership .

The Member Value Plus (MVP) program is very mature, with slightly over 3000 subscriptions to individual MVP publications as of May, 1999. Details are online at http://www.acm.org/sigs/membership/mvp.txt.

Education

SIGGRAPH's education program re-examined its work and re-organized itself in terms of projects in order to regain impetus in its activities. This program includes a number of activities at our annual conference and many activities throughout the year. The conference activities include meetings of groups having specific educational intereste; competitive grants to support educators' conference attendance; exhibits of student posters, slides, animations, and interactive works; and collaboration with the conference Educators Program. Other activities include a quarterly newsletter; developing curriculum materials and educational resources; and traveling student work from the conference. For several years we have maintained a Web site for educational materials at http://www.education.siggraph.org/, and are planning to re-organize that site as a portal for educational content and to focus on upgrading the content by refereeing materials. We also participated in planning the Graphics and Visualization Education workshop discussed elsewhere in this report.

Professional Chapters

SIGGRAPH has 41 Professional Chapters chartered or in formation in 15 countries. They have active programs of meetings, exhibitions, facility visits, and conferences, with content covering everything from the technical to creative sides of our field. Many chapters maintain relations with local chapters of other professional associations. Chapter membership has increased to around 3700, up from 3100 a year ago.

Similarly to education, chapters have an active presence at our annual conference. We have a Chapters booth, an annual party, cooperation with the conference outreach program, and meetings and workshops to provide chapters with information and experience to help them grow and have successful programs.

Awards

In 1998 SIGGRAPH presented the Computer Graphics Achievement Award to Michael F. Cohen for the development of practical radiosity methods for realistic image synthesis. The full citation for this award is in the SIGGRAPH 98 Conference Proceedings.

SIGGRAPH's Outstanding Contributions to SIGGRAPH award recognizes persons who have given extraordinary service to SIGGRAPH, both in the trenches and in positions of more responsibility or visibility, over many years. This award was inaugurated at SIGGRAPH 98 and was given to Maxine Brown, a long-time contributor to both the SIGGRAPH conference and organization.

Relationships

SIGGRAPH continues our cooperation agreements with Eurographics and with the Multimedia Content Association of Japan (MMCA). SIGGRAPH also cooperates with an international group on visualization in Geographic Information Systems (CARTO) and with SIGCOMM on conference content related to networking and computer graphics.

The value of our work in building the relationship with Eurographics was shown in August, 1998 when Judith R. Brown (incoming SIGGRAPH Chair) and Steve Cunningham (outgoing SIGGRAPH Chair) were elected Fellows of Eurographics in recognition of our work over several years to build that relationship as Eurographics members and SIGGRAPH officers.

Projects

Special Projects
A special project funded in 1997, a SIGGRAPH Video Review issue on animation of the 1970s, was completed this year and will debut at SIGGRAPH 99. Special Projects funded this year include

A major project for $26,000 to create a website containing VRML models and animations representing a sub-lexicon of approximately 150-200 signs for deaf informants in communicating computer-related terminology,
Creation of a logo for the SIGGRAPH 30th celebration, at a cost of $4100,
Third year of the Carto Project: Integrating Computer Graphics and Spatial Data, $4250.

Additional proposals have been submitted and are awaiting decisions. Guidelines for special projects and forms for submitting applications for special project funding are on SIGGRAPH's Web pages.

Other projects
A project with the Smithsonian National Museum of American History has created a collection of computer animations of science-related subjects to attract museum-goers to the NMAH's Information Age display. SIGGRAPH has also created a movie, "The Story of Computer Graphics," in HDTV format to tell the public the story of our field. This movie will premier at SIGGRAPH 99 and will be made available to public TV and other documentary-style TV outlets. It was funded by funds from SIGGRAPH reserves and corporate donations.

Public Policy

SIGGRAPH's public policy activities included participation in the Computers, Freedom, and Privacy Conference and in a congressional briefing in March, 1999. A regular Public Policy column now appears in Computer Graphics, and a public policy presence has been developed on the siggraph.org site.

Leadership Development

Leadership development is always a concern in an active organization. We have an annual "Get Involved!" event at the conference to attract interested persons so they can be guided to appropriate tasks in both the organization and conference, and we have an overall policy in the organization that committee chairs try to identify and develop persons who can succeed them when they move to other tasks. As SIGGRAPH has grown, however, the amount of work asked of volunteers has grown to the point where it discourages some potential contributors, so there is need to work with ACM SIG Services to move some of the tasks to professional support.

Computer and other equipment

The conference Chief Staff Executive maintains the equipment inventory for both the conference and the SIGGRAPH organization (because the bulk of the equipment is used for the conference). This equipment inventory has been coordinated with Patrick McCarren separately and this will be continued with our new Program Director.