How do you feel about Siggraph Asia?

3D scanning for hairstyles (critiques as off-topic for SIGGRAPH below) sounds on-topic to me. Computer vision in general, certainly! It's "Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques", not "Rendering". SIGGRAPH will certainly have many rendering papers this year as always, but it's a large multidisciplinary conference and IMHO that's the beauty of it.

For those of you who have reviewed papers for SIGGRAPH 2008, I would like to take an unofficial poll about what you think of this year's review process, in particular, the new part asking reviewers (including all primary, secondary and tertiary) to try to reach consensus before the committee meeting.

Among the 8 papers that I reviewed, 6 of them reached unanimous consensus so that's all cool. In one of the remaining 2, I had a different opinion from other reviewers and in the end the senior review essentially twisted my arm to agree with them. In the other one, the paper received a bimodal distribution of scores (2 >= 4.0 and 3 <= 3.0) but interestingly, only 3 reviewers chimed in during the discussion process. In the end, no consensus is reached (or even attempted).

I think I like the transparency of this added phase of asking all reviewers to reach consensus, and I would say at least in the 8 papers that I reviewed, I have not seen any abuse of the review process. Even for the 2 papers that did not reach full consensus, they both got accepted so at least they are erred on the positive side; I always think it is a bigger crime to reject a good paper than to accept a bad one; for the former, I lose a chance to read a really good paper but in the latter, I could always choose not to read it or in the worst waste a little bit time to figure out the paper is bad.

This also brings us to the earlier posts regarding topics of accepted papers. I believe as long as the papers have gone through a fair and organic review process, I have no problem seeing non-traditional stuff, e.g. computer vision or computational photography. In all likelihood they could broaden people's research scope, and in the worst case you could always choose not to read them.

To #274.

Yes, the topics in the SIGGRAPH this year will be very diverse. So far I see those non-graphics topics (according to your definition):

1. Computational photography
2. Perception and color science
3. GPGPU
4. Deblurring

In my opinion, they are all very valuable to the computer graphics community. Many computational photography papers relies on the light transport theory, and their results may benefit the traditional problems in the future. For example, there is a paper that uses flash/non-flash image pairs to reconstruct the depth map. Also, if you can use those devices to achieve the special effects in acquisition, why you need to rendering them in the post-processing stage?

All perception related topics are of fundamental importance, especially when the physics-based rendering algorithms are very mature (if we don't consider the speed issue) and the expressive images mostly rely on the post-processing at the pixel shaders. Finally, when GPU becomes so powerful, porting some complex algorithm onto GPU is a great idea. As for the deblurring...I have no comment. But at least the results shown in the papers are really amazing.

Most reviewers and committee members have published numerous pure-graphics SIGGRAPH papers and still decide to make the SIGGRAPH like this. Maybe you should see the quality of the rejected papers to make the fair judgement. Also, the topics you like may kill the graphics in other's point of view. For example, I can blame measured BRDF data that kill the analytic BRDF functions. We should ask more talented people to design new BRDF functions to kill the measured BRDF data :P.

Ok, so the semi-official SIGGRAPH 2008 paper list is being compiled, and it seems it's true what they say. Graphics is dead. We now have a conference called SIGGRAPH, but most papers appear to be about yet another project where somebody used a number of digital cameras and duct tape to build yet another specialized 3D scanner of some sort. Shouldn't there be some IEEE Optics Conference or something like this? Almost all of this is computer vision at best, if not just homebrew hardware engineering. You certainly would hardly have called any of this computer graphics 10 years ago. It seems the remaining people doing graphics research can now be found in venues such as IEEE Visualization and the like.

Seriously, there is a paper on a 3-D scanner for acquiring HAIRSTYLES this year. You've got to be kidding me!