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Quitting the Graphics Field Over SIGGRAPH
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."
In replying to this comment, I know that I'm going to sound like a bitter grad student; but, for some reason, I feel inclined to burn karma and make this statement:
I sympathize with this professor, and the trouble that he has faced. Although I work in the field of computer security (instead of computer graphics), I have seen many novel and ingenious papers rejected from conferences precisely because they are not from the current 'fad' field. Usually, I require large amounts of caffeine (and alcohol) just to make it through the conferences I attend, because they are filled with uninteresting papers written by hack academics attempting to ride the latest trend.
Perhaps it is this experience that has influenced the way in which I do academic reviews for conferences, when I am called upon to do so. I have no patience for papers that have nothing meaningful to say. Whenever I give an 'accept' rating to a paper, it is because I feel that the authors have something genuinely interesting to say. Whenever I give a 'reject' rating to a paper, I do my best to give as many constructive comments as I can -- I try to point out what insightful or meaningful things the author has done, as well as things that are genuine technical flaws and should be addressed. But, the thing I am never scared to do? I have never backed down from stating in a review, blatently, that the author's work seems novel and useful, and that some of the details are way over my head and should be subject to further review.
Given all the (meaningless) talk about reforming the academic review process, I often wonder: how much of the problem described by this professor would be solved if more reviewers had the balls to admit that some of the most novel ideas were over their heads?
There once was a boy who was hired to work on a construction crew. He was proud to be doing something useful and productive. The forman set him to tossing building stone over a wall.
The boy labored hard and was proud to have moved the pile of stone in record time. Surely this would show his usefullness and move up in the crew heirarchy in time.
The boy went to the forman and asked what task he should perform next.
"Throw 'em back over the wall," said the forman.
"What?" yelled the boy. "Why did you have me throw them over the wall in the first place if you were just going to have me throw them back?"
"Well," said the foreman. "You seemed a fine lad to me and I was proud to be able to offer you something to do in order that could learn to earn a wage. Perhaps someday I'll actually have something useful for you to do."
"To hell with this," the boy muttered under his breath and wandered off to find something useful he could do right now, whether it earned him a wage or not.
The moral of the story is: Fuck 'em. Fuck 'em all. Sideways.
KFG
I don't know if SIGGRAPH has shrunk or not (I wasn't in graphics in '97), but I wouldn't say that the GDC has taken its place. I sympathize with Ashikhmin's frustration at the conference (but not his reaction), having been on the receiving end of a few cryptic SIGGRAPH rejections.
First of all, I don't agree that it's "mostly a rendering convention now". I'd say there were about 20 papers on rendering and compression out of 80 or 90 papers (unofficial page of papers). I also think that there's lots of "technical action" going on there.
The real problem is that SIGGRAPH hasn't grown with its field. One major conference was fine for the first 20 years or so, but graphics has grown in size and diversity so much in the last 15 years that it's ridiculous that there's still only one "top-shelf" conference. Look at the proceedings for this year's conference; there are papers on rendering, compression, ray-tracing, image processing, vision, data-driven modelling, GPGPU, procedural modelling, HDR, graphics APIs, fluid simulation, photography, mocap, light fields, pcrt, computational geometry, crowd sim, animation, and npr.
EACH of these things that are getting lumped into "GRAPHICS" is enough of a field in its own right that it deserves several journals and conferences of its own.
That's not even the meat of the problem; there ARE conferences for each of these topics, but people generally only submit SIGGRAPH rejects to them! The problem is that everyone wants the prestige that goes with a SIGGRAPH publication, and it's a vicious cycle; there are reviewers who shoot down every paper they feel is a threat to their own work and get away with it, and this forces anyone else who wants to survive there to do the same.
What needs to happen, in my bull-headed opinion, is for all of those people who write good papers that never make it to SIGGRAPH start submitting the first time around to the other conferences - I3D, Pacific Graphics, SCA, IEEE VIS, Eurographics, et cetera. These are all perfectly viable venues that will become as prestigious as people would like, if only people would take them seriously.
I say, let the small-minded dweebs have SIGGRAPH; we shouldn't gauge the quality of our work solely based on SIGGRAPH's rejection policy - even if it were a totally fair process, not every good paper can make it in. Submit your awesome paper to the other conferences, and once these other conferences are packed with impressive work, it'll mean as much as SIGGRAPH.
Just wishful (and a little bitter) thinking.
I don't think "hardware" was the right category for this...
Salon des Refusés:
In the 1860s, artists of the nascent realist and impressionist movements submitted works to the Salon de Paris, the official exhibition sponsored by the Académie des beaux-arts, selection committee only to be rejected. The resultant complaints of bias led French emperor Napoleon III to allow the rejected works to be displayed in a separate exhibition.
The first Salon des Refusés in 1863 invited art-works rejected for display at the Salon de Paris.
Most were poor quality, leading to ridicule in the press. However, the exhibition included several important paintings including Édouard Manet's Le déjeuner sur l'herbe (The Luncheon on the Grass) and James McNeill Whistler's The White Girl. Other artists who showed at the Salon des Refusés include Henri Fantin-Latour, Paul Cézanne, Armand Guillaumin, Johan Jongkind, and Camille Pissarro.
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.