Confessions of a researchaholic

It will be great if SIGGRAPH (and other conferences) could have a new registration category called “social pass”. This social pass will be (significantly) cheaper than full registration, and is designed primarily for people who go to conferences mainly to socialize with colleagues. When I was in grad school I used to listen attentively to all the technical sessions, but nowadays (for better or worse) I found myself spending so much time chatting with people to the point that I serious doubt the value I paid for a full registration. I still go to many technical sessions, but my main purpose now turn to meet specific people (e.g. paper authors or people who work on related fields) and pay enough attention to the presentations so that I could have enough information to chat up with the authors later on. (Man, I like your presentation, especially demo XXX. What a cool paper!)

On a further thought, I could be tricky to design such a social pass. If I just want to talk to people in the hallways, I actually do not have to pay a dime and just need to walk into the convention center. But then that might not be enough, as a lot of the conversations happen inside the sessions (especially at the beginnings and ends) and the parties (most of which, hosted by various companies and research groups, I could already go for free). So I still need the credential to attend a certain subset of full registration.

Maybe one possibility is to charge for individual sessions so that I could pick only these that I plan to attend (to socialize). For the rest, I could simply loiter in the hallways and the parties.

So it turns out that example-based texture synthesis has been deployed in Disney’s Tangled; for more details, see here (author’s site) and here (ACM DL).

So now people can no longer claim example-based texture synthesis is useless. ;-D

Anyone knows any other production scenarios please let me know.

This is one of the mysteries that I have yet to figure out. Obviously, publishing is very important, and reviewing is the main factor deciding whether a submitted paper will be published. But somehow the reviewers receive almost no credit (except for token ones like conference mugs or listed names on the proceedings).

As a result, it should not be a surprise that many people spend much less efforts in reviewing than in publishing. And it is hard for me to imagine this asymmetry in efforts would not cause any problems, or least would not prevent the peer review systems from being better or more effective.

A simple solution is to publish good reviews, *under the reviewers consensus*, for both positive and negative opinions towards the relevant papers. The reviews could appear alongside the published papers in the proceedings, or at least in the digital library.

I could see several advantages of such an approach. First of all, it would make the recognition between papers and reviews more symmetric, and thus gives the reviewers more incentives to do a good job. Since the reviewers could opt for not having the reviews published, there should be no concern about integrity of the review process. The reviews could also provide more useful information for the papers, in the form of digests or opinions. Since reviewers are often among those who read the papers most carefully and thoroughly, their comments could provide additional angles for the relevant papers, which by nature reflect the authors (mostly) one sided opinions. This also makes the review process more transparent, producing a better sense of fairness and letting out some hints on why the papers are accepted.

Of course, reviews for rejected papers would not be published, but the symmetry between publishing/reviewing remains so I do not see any major problems here. One side effect would be that people might steer away from reviewing apparently bad papers even more so than they would now. But I would say that if the committee finds it hard to recruit reviewers for a particular submission, it might as well be a good reason to reject the paper outright; if a paper cannot even attract reviewers, how likely is that it would attract readers once published?