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Quitting the Graphics Field Over SIGGRAPH

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the instead-of-fighting-for-change dept.

An anonymous reader writes "A Professor at Stony Brook university has quit the field of computer graphics. He claims too much importance is given to one particular conference (SIGGRAPH) and that acceptance of papers in this conference has too much importance in terms of the careers (tenure, grants etc) of a researcher. Furthermore he claims the paper reviewing for SIGGRAPH is not fair and bright and novel papers are summarily rejected because they are either not from a 'hot' field or because the reviewer does not understand the concept and is not willing to spend time understanding it. He has started a discussion forum which has comments from several big names in the field including the papers chair of SIGGRAPH 2007."

4 of 71 comments (clear)

  1. Re:And? by kfg · · Score: 2, Informative

    http://www.ic.arizona.edu/ic/mcbride/ws200/weavwom e.htm

    There is branch of anthropology devoted entirely to basketweaving.

    KFG

  2. it's not quite that simple... by oohshiny · · Score: 5, Informative

    There are different kinds of "I don't understand it".

    If the reviewer doesn't understand the importance of the claims or conclusion of the paper, then that's the author's problem. It's the responsibility of the author to make those clear and accessible to everybody.

    If the reviewer doesn't understand the methods of the paper, that's the reviewer's problem. Methods sections need to be detailed, accurate, and take as little room as possible, which makes them intrinsically hard to understand. But that's not a problem because they are meant for reproducing the work, not for understanding it.

  3. Start a new conference by Xerotope · · Score: 2, Informative

    If there are truly such systematic problems with SIGGRAPH, then there are probably sufficient other researchers interested in a new, improved computer graphics conference.

    Sebastian Thrun and a few others were fed up with the quality of ICRA and IROS, so they started a wholey new conference last year, Robotics Science and Systems. It was successful, and IEEE is now even helping to organize future sessions.

    Also, this kind of competition works. ICRA was noticeably better this year, as conferences will make changes in order to stay relevant.

  4. Re:And? by Omega697 · · Score: 2, Informative

    How about Artificial Intelligence, Security, Compilers, Theory, Distributed Systems, Formal Methods, Programming Languages, or Databases? All of these other subfields of CS have several, if not many healthy conferences to which one can submit papers. I know many people working in graphics and they all have stated repeatedly that unless you get papers into SIGGRAPH, you are nobody. SIGGRAPH is the only game in town for graphics. Did you even read the article summary?