Empirical evidence suggests that the best background for virtual meetings is a photo of my office taken at exactly the same camera view of my office webcam so that I will appear to be joining meetings from my office regardless of my actual physical location.
2023-04-21
2023-04-18
Single review paper committee member
It turns out that I only need to review one paper as a committee member for a top venue thanks to “the large number of IPC members”. (Cannot go any lower unless we want to list someone who does not review any paper as a PC member.)
Expanding the committee to include more members can lighten the individual workloads, but also reduce the visibility of each PC member for calibration purposes.
I wonder what the sweet spot would be as a function of the number of submissions and the number of PC members.
1 is definitely slow while 20 is high (based on my recent SIGGRAPH/SIGGRAPH-Asia PC experiences), while 4 to 8 feels about right to me.
2023-04-16
Outside the mandates
Recently, during the preparation for an invited talk on a topic I have been working on for a while, I realized that even though I am familiar with the topic, I have yet to organize my thoughts into a coherent story, and I am glad that this invited talk motivated me to do just that.
Giving academic talks is outside my current main job duties and thus I wouldn’t be as incentivized to do that as teaching courses as an university professor or shipping products as an industry researcher.
But this experience made me realize that there are activities outside our official job mandates that can still benefit our careers in a less direct way or in a longer run.
2023-04-09
Compsite sketch
After two quick pencil-on-paper sketches around the de Young Museum I came back home later to draw a digital composite.
Left: attempt to draw a sculpture in the Kehinde Wiley exhibition but it was too dark for me to continue
Up: quick sketch of a Mayan effigy vessel
Right: quick sketch of a guy sitting on the grass inside the Shakespeare garden
Bottom: attempt to draw a dog near the guy above but had to leave
The potential of being on both SIGGRAPH and SIGGRAPH Asia technical papers PC in the same year
I have already served on the SIGGRAPH 2023 technical papers program committee and just got asked to do that for SIGGRAPH Asia 2023 as well.
I have not yet decided (at this moment of writing) whether to turn down the latter or do both at the same year, but either will be the first time in my career, and I will feel bad about potentially disappointing the paper chairs or spending another month’s worth of evenings of reviewing papers.
2023-04-06
Benefits of reviewing papers
Reviewing papers can take a lot of time, but also has the following benefits:
It is a good way to build reputation and relationship with the research community, especially if you can do a good job and write a good review on time and participate in the discussion phase to help reach the final decision if that is part of the review process.
If you submit to a venue, it is only fair to review for that venue, especially if you have complained that your submissions have not received good/fair reviews due to lack of expertise or efforts from the reviewers.
It is a good way to learn about the latest research in the field, especially if you are assigned to review papers outside your main research areas.
Writing a good review (see above) requires deep enough understanding of the paper beyond the usually more cursory catching up of published papers.
It is a good way to learn how to get your own submissions accepted in the future by looking at how decisions are made and what the reviewers are looking for.
Accept only reviews that you think you have the time and expertise to do a decent job, and do not feel bad about declining reviews otherwise, preferably within a few days of receiving the request with suggestions for alternative reviewers so that the organizers can find replacements in time.
Other things being equal, prioritize review requests from higher-quality venues for which your reviews would tend to make a relatively bigger impact.
2023-04-04
Motion graphics with Chinese characters
The idea behind this experiment came to my mind while I was reading about futurism typography.
2023-03-29
ACM authorship policy
So ACM is updating their authorship policy in response to generative AI tools.
You can find more about that in this survey.
I do wonder, though, what if a paper is written entirely by AI without any humans involved?
2023-03-26
Optometry visit
I manually traced the vector contours over the photographs captured by my mom to highlight the cute hand gestures and facial expressions of my niece performed during an optometry visit.