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.
2023-04-09
The potential of being on both SIGGRAPH and SIGGRAPH Asia technical papers PC in the same year
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.
Kehinde Wiley: An Archaeology of Silence
I went to see this exhibition today and was astonished by the details and accuracies of these large scale oil paintings and bronze sculptures made all within the past two years!
How did the artist accomplish such combination of care, size, and speed?
2023-03-25
2023-03-24
SIGGRAPH 2023 paper committee meeting
Some random thoughts after just finished the SIGGRAPH 2023 paper committee meetings:
The shorter papers in the conference track submissions took me less time to read, but not as much as the page numbers would suggest; many papers were either harder to read due to condensed texts or would require extra time to go over the supplementary materials.
The virtual meetings (started during the covid pandemic) are more efficient in terms of travels and moving people in and out of the conflict and break-out rooms, while the physical meetings are more fun (e.g., the snacks and food) and sociable (reading people’s facial expressions and body languages while discussing papers, and chatting about research and life in general).
After serving on the SIGGRAPH/SIGGRAPH-Asia PC a few times, I felt that it is more suitable for either beginning folks who have a lot of energy (e.g., can read 3 papers in one night without getting tired) or retired folks who have a lot of time (e.g., have time to read 3 papers in one afternoon without many work/family duties) than folks in the middle (like me) who are not as energic as they used to be and yet have more work/family commitments.
Both of my managers also happened to be on the committee, so they will understand why I haven’t spent as much time on products as I am supposed to.
2023-03-22
Monotile sampling
As (half) joked in this FB comment today, I can totally imagine someone (like Victor Ostromoukhov or Abdalla G. M. Ahmed) building a sample set upon this recently discovered aperiodic monotile for an upcoming SIGGRAPH paper.
(I know how to do that already, and thus not planning to do it myself.)