12.20.08
SIGGRAPH Asia 2008, 10 – 13 December 2008
2008 is indeed an interesting year in Singapore, as there are many ‘first’ time interesting events in this year, namely Microsoft Research Asia Symposium , Anime Festival Asia 2008, and last but not least, the spin-off of famous conference in computer graphics field, SIGGRAPH, is held in Asia for the first time in Singapore with the name SIGGRAPH ASIA. The SIGGRAPH conference is said to be the topmost conference in computer graphics, and having our papers been accepted in the conference may raise our ’status’ (or in the case of PhD student, might greatly smoothen our path to passing the PhD study). The quality of SIGGRAPH ASIA is said to be comparable to the regular SIGGRAPH held in United States.
This chance was particularly a blessing as this was the first time I attended a conference and it was one of the best conference albeit I had to spend large sum of money, Sin$450 (for full-conference pass) + US$ 25 (for registering to be an ACM student member) for attending the conference. However, the experience I got from this conference is worth the money I paid, as I met some of the most famous figures in Computer Graphics field such as Mark Kilgard, Kurt Akeley, Mark Harris, Henrik Wann Jensen, etc. and also learned much from the four-days conference. Anyway, it is possible to be granted full conference pass by becoming student volunteers who have to assist the conference by doing various jobs such checking attendees’ badges and carrying items. The downside of being a student volunteer is that it might not possible to attend some events in the conference (or worse, the ones relevant to the student’s research) if it is during the volunteer’s shift.
The conference does not merely have technical paper presentations, but also courses , sketches (short presentation of ongoing research), educators program, art gallery and emerging technology, computer animation festival, exhibition, and so on. Those events ran in parallel, so the attendees sometimes had to wisely decide which event to attend.
On Friday night, the reception was held in a seperate venue in Marina Barrage which has beautiful scene. However I did not anticipate it so I did not have a camera to take some shots. (Moreover, it was forbidden to take pictures in the conference yet I saw some people did it). It was a social time to get to know to researchers and to discuss the research. Luckily, on this occasion I managed to get introduced to my supervisor’s former supervisor, Tomoyuki Nishita.
On the last day I attended the Electronic Theatre together with my colleagues from my lab. In Electronic Theatre we were shown some of the best great CG animation clips. Some of them were already uploaded by somebody to youtube (Special Thanks to Vera Junaria, for keeping the following hyperlinks I lost):
The next SIGGRAPH ASIA will be in Yokohama next year in December. Let’s hope that I manage to publish a conference paper (or sketeches , or posters) for next year’s SIGGRAPH ASIA or any other future SIGGRAPHs so that this SIGGRAPH ASIA 2008 is not the first time and the last time I attended a SIGGRAPH conference
