Confessions of a researchaholic

While at SIGGRAPH conferences I usually spent the majority of my “attendance time” in the animation festivals and production talks primarily because (1) the contents are usually not recorded for later consumption, (2) the effects look nice, and (3) the topics tend to be something I am less familiar with, even after 20+ years in the field.

The animation creations and effects productions are hybrids of art and science/engineering.
Each effect is tailored for the specific style and story and created by a combination of artistic practices and off-the-shelf/bespoke tools.
The presentations tend to focus on the design process and tools deployment, instead of technical methods and implementations.

I just looked at a single-authored SIGGRAPH submission from a recent collaborator (with a first-authored SIGGRAPH paper before even getting into a graduate degree program), intentionally after the deadline to ensure that I wouldn’t be tempted to contribute anything to his solo effort (as I just did) before the review process.
I like the work and hope it will get accepted so that we could finally meet in person at the conference.
(Hopefully the Canadian visa would be easier to obtain than the US equivalence, as otherwise he would not have any co-author to present the paper.)

I used to concentrate my paper submissions to a venue that gained prestige by accepting only the most novel ideas, but its prestige has been diluted with more incremental works over the years to the point that it has higher acceptance rate than alternatives (in an overlapping but different field) that I now submit to more.

There are several aspects of scientific research that excite me: solving a challenging problem, publishing a paper, shipping a product, creating a demo/artwork, presenting a talk, reviewing a submission, serving on a committee, attending a conference, meeting people with shared interests, working with collaborators.

But what excites me the most is discovering new ideas and insights, especially those that are surprising or unexpected.
Looking back at my research career, here are some examples:

• My PhD thesis work on texture synthesis – fixed neighborhoods, over manifold surfaces, from multiple sources (blending and 3D volumes from 2D views), and order-independent/random-accessible synthesis.
• Tile-based texture mapping, in particular the math and algorithms for packing and random access.
• Parallel white noise and blue noise generation, analogous to the order-independent texture synthesis.
• Inverse texture synthesis, basically a reversal of traditional (forward) texture synthesis.
• Nonlinear Beam Tracing on a GPU \cite{Liu:2011:NBT} – it is possible to use rasterization to achieve some ray tracing effects.
• Nonlinear revision control for images – revision control can be applied beyond code and text!
• Differential domain analysis for non-uniform sampling – the trigonometric expansion of the power spectrum depends only on the relative sample positions, and the subsequent synthesis method of point sampling with general noise spectrum.
• Improving light field camera sample design with irregularity and aberration – randomness/noise helps with computational photography.
• Autocomplete painting repetitions, hand-drawn animations, and 3D sculpting – the use of workflows for analysis and prediction.
• Mapping virtual and physical reality and the subsequent work on leveraging temporary blindness to avoid warping at all for redirected walking \cite{Sun:2018:TVR}.

In retrospect, I tend to have more focus, and likely as a consequence, more innovation during the earlier stage of my career, and more breadth (in terms of topics and applications) towards the later stage.
But it is really the unexpected intellectual discovery that keeps me excited, which I missed.