I had an opportunity to speak to the
Chair of ACM SIGGRAPH at the annual conference this year. His name
is Jeff Jortner and he works at Sandia Labs (that is his real job
that pays the bills).
He very kindly gave some of his time to
explain to me a few of his ideas about the future of the SIGGRAPH
Annual Conference that seemed very plausible to me.
I asked him if he was aware of the
hardship that existed in the computer animation community, the large
number of people who were not working, or who had to leave the
country in order to work. Or the number of pioneers who were
struggling to find work of any type, some of whom were homeless or
all but homeless.
I may have caught him by surprise but I
got the impression that he (and by analogy, they, as in the committee
that runs SIGGRAPH) was not aware of any of this. He was aware of
issues involving whether or not CS departments at various
universities would continue to hold a slot for a computer graphics
professor once the original tenured professor retires, but that was
the extent of his or their knowledge or concern, at least to the
extent he communicated them to me in that brief and impromptu
meeting.
It seems to me that if there is a
problem here, if we feel that SIGGRAPH should be doing more (and it
is not clear to me that they can do anything, but nevertheless) if we
even want them to consider the issues, then we have to do a better
job of making the national committee aware of what is going on.
I am a little baffled about how best to
do this, but I suppose the first step is to contact the members of
the board and either have a dialog with them, or find out who
(perhaps a subcommittee) one should have a dialog with.
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