Computing Reviews News

Conference Spotlight: SIGGRAPH Asia 2010

The third SIGGRAPH Asia conference will be held from December 15 – 18, 2010 in Seoul, Korea. This year’s conference will continue to present the best in computer graphics and interactive technologies to a worldwide audience. Computing Reviews has a significant readership in Asia, and we hope that some of our readers and reviewers will be attending the conference.

If you are a Computing Reviews reviewer, and would like to like to write a post-conference reviewer report for the blog, please let us know via email. The conferences will feature many exciting programs and we would love to get your take on the latest developments and innovations.

Reviewer's Report: CCCG 2010

This guest post on CCCG 2010 is by CR reviewer Joseph O'Rourke, Professor and Chair of the Computer Science Department at Smith College.

The superbly organized 22nd annual Canadian Conference on Computational Geometry (CCCG 2010) was held August 9-11, 2010, at the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg, Canada. As usual, the talks were informal, with participant questions interrupting the (often student) speakers. And following a long tradition, there was intense activity surrounding open problems posed at the conference. All sessions were parallel, so I missed half of them. And, in any case, no summary of the wide variety is possible. Instead, I will focus on four personal favorites.

Coauthors of the famous Komei Fukuda (H. Miyata and S. Moriyama) reported on an impressive effort to complete enumeration of small oriented matroids. To cite one result, they established that there are exactly 47,923 5-dimensional polytopes with 9 vertices. The database of polytopes they have established should prove very useful for exploring conjectures, for example, concerning f-vectors of d-polytopes. Their calculations required two months on 64 machines, each with 64 cores!

There were three distinguished invited speakers—David Avis, David Eppstein, and David Kirkpatrick—but I will concentrate on the middle David. He showed that there is a generalization of “Schnyder woods” to regular labelings of graphs deriving from three distinct geometric classes: grid triangulations, rectangular subdivisions, and orthogonal polyhedra. In each case, it is possible to obtain if-and-only-if characterizations that capture the class by coloring and orienting the edges of the graph. This leaves the high-level open problem of discovering what unifying principle explains the close relation among these three different labelings.

A more focused open problem was raised in a paper presented by Filip Morić on behalf of his coauthors R. Fulek, B. Keszegh, and I. Uljarević. Let there be n red and n blue points in general position in the plane. They established that there is a simple polygon that separates red from blue that is composed of between n and 3⌈n/2⌉ edges. The open problem is to close the gap. Filip conjectured that their upper bound may be closer to the truth.

An unusual five-person presentation by a father and son (Martin and Erik Demaine) and a mother and her two sons (Anna Lubiw and Jonah and Arlo Shallit) explored zipper unfoldings of convex polyhedra. At one point in the presentation, Arlo emerged from a zippered box! They showed that all the Platonic and Archimedean solids have Hamiltonian paths along their edges, which, when cut, unfold the surfaces without overlap. They raised the intriguing question of whether every convex polyhedron has a Hamiltonian path, not necessarily along edges, which similarly unfolds the surface without overlap.

More than a third of the open problems presented at the 2009 conference were either completely or partially solved by the 2010 conference, and we can hope for a similar success rate with this year’s suite of problems.

Above photo from http://www.cs.umanitoba.ca/~cccg2010/

Reviewer's Report: The Mathematics of Klee and Grünbaum 2010

This guest post on The Mathematics of Klee and Grünbaum 2010 is by CR reviewer Joseph O'Rourke, Professor and Chair of the Computer Science Department at Smith College.

This conference in honor of the mathematical contributions of Victor Klee and Branko Grünbaum, held July 28-30, 2010, was subtitled “100 years in Seattle” because, in sum, they have been professors at the University of Washington that long. Victor Klee passed away in 2007, but Grünbaum was present and actively participated in the talks with his penetrating questions and observations. This was a pure mathematics conference, concentrating on their specialties in geometry and combinatorics. Few computer scientists were in attendance, but the topics nevertheless are quite relevant to computer science.

The nature of the conference led to a wide range of talks not easily summarized. Instead, I will concentrate on the most spectacular result presented: Francisco Santos’ description of his recent counterexample to the Hirsch conjecture. This conjecture says that the diameter of a convex polytope of n facets in d dimensions is at most n − d. Here, the diameter is the longest path of edges between any two facets of the polytope. It was proved for d ≤ 3, but stood unresolved for 50 years before Santos cracked the problem in the spring of 2010. Aside from its mathematical interest, this conjecture is important because the simplex method for solving a linear program walks along a path on the surface of a polytope (often in dimensions as large as d = 10000). So the diameter of the polytope provides a lower bound on its worst-case complexity, and establishing an upper bound on the diameter raises that complexity lower bound.

Santos’ smallest counterexample is a 38-dimensional polytope of 76 facets, so n−d = 76−38 = 38; but its diameter is 39, +1 beyond the conjectured bound. Using this example, he can build polytopes that violate the conjecture by a factor of (1 + ε) for any ε > 0 and fixed dimension d. His counterexample is based on the construction of what he calls a “spindle” polytope in five dimensions, which derives, appropriately enough, from the work of Victor Klee. Due to the importance of his result, Santos supplemented his convincing proofs with computational verification. There is no question: the Hirsch conjecture has been settled negatively. (And Grünbaum needs to update his masterwork Convex Polytopes again!)

Where that leaves us was nicely described in Gil Kalai’s talk at the conference on the “polynomial Hirsch conjecture,” which states that the diameter is bounded by some polynomial in d and n. It is a remarkable indication of our ignorance of convex polytopes that we cannot bound their diameter by, say, n¹⁰⁰ d¹⁰⁰. The best upper bounds are n^logd+1 and n2^d−3: quasi-polynomial and linear for d fixed (but remember: d can be large). It is curious that the behavior of one of the most successful and heavily used algorithms of all time—the simplex method—remains mysterious. Perhaps this breakthrough on the diameter of polytopes will eventually lead to a dispelling of this mystery.

(Above photo credit: https://sites.google.com/a/alaska.edu/kleegrunbaum/)

Reviewer's Report: RSA 2010

This guest post on RSA 2010 is by Phoram Mehta, one of our reviewers and a senior consultant at Solutionary, Inc.

RSA 2010 was held March 1-5 in San Francisco, CA, as it has been every year for the last two decades. The conference has come a long way during this time--from the sheer number of attendees (a mere 50 in 1991 to almost 25,000 (unofficial estimate) in 2010) to the topics covered. It’s also expanded into Europe and Japan. In my opinion, the reason for its popularity is an organizing committee that balances the contents so well that anyone who has anything do with security could gain something from attending the conference. The Expo alone--with all of the free gadgets and amusing presentations (Symantec this year had their version of the “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire” game show), standard presentations, and specialty kiosks--was worth attending for folks like me who like to stay abreast of the latest technologies that are being transformed into products that can be used to improve the state of enterprise security. Cloud computing and virtualization security were clearly the trends, with vendors showcasing their offerings in support of the cloud.

Keynotes

RSA is known to draw the biggest names in the industry for its keynotes; this year was no different. Eighteen keynote speeches in four days covered every topic under the sun, from how the private sector fared through the biggest recession of our times to what big brother is doing to keep close tabs on citizens without raising too many privacy questions. The first-ever Whitehouse Cyber Security Coordinator, Howard  Schmidt (photo at right), discussed his initiatives and the CEOs of McAfee, PGP, VeriSign, and others spoke about trends and next steps. Once again, messages on security in the cloud were loud and clear. You can access a complete list and videos/podcasts of the keynotes here.

Track Sessions
The conference offered 18 tracks with over 250 sessions. The topics covered ranged from application development to physical security & infrastructure (and everything in between). Every single security concept was being discussed in one room or another. The quality of the sessions varied greatly. Even though the categories--non-technical, intermediate, and advanced--provide some indication of the content, there are always a few that disappoint you (and, on the flip side, some that wow you). My personal experience is to use the ratings of the speakers in combination with the topic to decide which sessions to attend. The introduction of data security and security as practice tracks in 2010 was quite welcome, however no other track in my opinion is as beloved as cryptography. 

Other Events
People usually think that Black Hat and DefCon have the most after-hour parties and events due to the fact that they are held in Las Vegas. But, having attended all three, I don’t think anything comes close to RSA. The official schedule has enough to keep those interested busy until the wee hours with P2P sessions, Innovation Sandbox, table for 6 networking dinners, and receptions from various organizations like the Executive Women’s Forum, ISC2, and Cloud Security Alliance, to name a few. In addition, the vendors represented inside the Expo hall and a few in nearby hotels have their own happy hours at restaurants and bars. Bruce Schneier reviewed local restaurants this year and provided his recommendations. There was also a video blog for attendees to record and broadcast what they thought of the conference.

All in all, this was a decent conference that had something for every individual who attended.

Conference Spotlight: SIGGRAPH Asia 2009

 
The second SIGGRAPH Asia conference will be held from December 16 –19, 2009 in Yokohama, Japan. This year's SIGGRAPH Asia promises to be a trip into the future with its groundbreaking technologies and projects. Computing Reviews has a significant readership throughout Asia. We hope that some of our readers and reviewers will be attending the conference. 

If you are a Computing Reviews reviewer and would like to write a post-conference blog entry, we would love to hear from you via email. There should be a lot of thought-provoking events and exhibits, and it would be great to get your take on what lies ahead in computer graphics and interactive designs.

Reviewer's Report: ACM Multimedia 2009

This guest post on ACM Multimedia 2009 is by Gerald Friedland, one of our reviewers and a research scientist at the International Computer Science Institute in Berkeley, CA.

ACM Multimedia was held in Beijing, China this year. Throughout its 17 years of existence, ACM Multimedia has established itself as the top conference in the field. What distinguishes ACM Multimedia from other conferences is the mixture of hardcore technical content (the acceptance rate is about 15% or less for full papers) with very creative art and interactive video exhibitions, and a tradition of interesting competitions such as the open-source competition and the new ACM Multimedia Grand Challenge. To add to the diversity, the conference also features excellent tutorials, workshops, keynotes, panels, a doctoral symposium, and a brave new topics session. My summary covers only a small part of ACM Multimedia 2009, and of course it is biased by my personal viewpoint.

Technical Content
This year's conference full and short papers came from four different tracks. The content track deals mainly with content analysis algorithms, such as multimedia content indexing, retrieval, and recognition. The application track features multimedia tools and end systems and, together with the systems track, forms the more applied part of the conference. A recently introduced track is the human-centered track, which features work on the human-centered computing aspects of multimedia. Over the years, the balance of the tracks has changed slightly. In earlier years, systems and applications were weighted a little heavier. These days, most talks belong to the content track. Traditionally, most work in this track is image- and video-based. However, this year, one could observe a clear trend toward multimodality. In contrast to earlier years, I estimate more than about 10% of the contributions (papers, workshops, open-source competition) dealt with audio content analysis and a significant part of the conference dealt with true multimedia content analysis. It will be interesting to see if this trend continues in the future.

Here is a small selection of papers that I found interesting:
- Unfolding speaker clustering potential: a biomimetic approach by Thilo Stadelmann and Bernd Freisleben
- Changing timbre and phrase in existing musical performances as you like: manipulations of single part using harmonic and inharmonic models by Naoki Yasuraoka, Takehiro Abe, Katsutoshi Itoyama, Toru Takahashi, Tetsuya Ogata, and Hiroshi G. Okuno
- Short-term audio-visual atoms for generic video concept classification by Wei Jiang, Courtenay Cotton, Shih-Fu Chang, Dan Ellis, and Alexander Loui (this was also a best paper candidate)
- Comprehensive query-dependent fusion using regression-on-folksonomies: a case study of multimodal music search by Bingjun Zhang, Qiaoliang Xiang, Huanhuan Lu, Jialie Shen, and Ye Wang
- Interactive background blurring by Chih-Yu Yan, Ming-Chun Tien, and Ja-Ling Wu
- Personal photo album summarization by Pinaki Sinha, Hamed Pirsiavash, and  Ramesh Jain
- MobileTI: a portable tele-immersive system by Wanmin Wu, Raoul Rivas, Ahsan Arefin, Shu Shi, Renata M. Sheppard, Bach D. Bui, and Klara Nahrstedt

Competitions
A major part of ACM Multimedia is competitions. Of course, it is prestigious to receive a best paper award at a conference with this acceptance rate. Therefore, the best paper award candidates (one from each track) are featured in one session. They were:
- Short-term audio-visual atoms for generic video concept classification by Wei Jiang, Courtenay Cotton, Shih-Fu Chang, Dan Ellis, and Alexander Loui
- Visual query suggestion by Zheng-Jun Zha, Linjun Yang, Tao Mei, Meng Wang, and Zengfu Wang (the winner)
- Design and deployment of a hybrid CDN-P2P system for live video streaming: experiences with LiveSky by Hao Yin, Xuening Liu, Tongyu Zhan, Vyas Sekar, Feng Qiu, Chuang Lin, and Hui Zhang, Bo Li
- Understanding near-duplicate videos: a user-centric approach by Mauro Cherubini, Rodrigo de Oliveira, Nuria Oliver

In the open-source competition, multimedia-relevant open-source projects compete for the title. This year, there were five finalists:
- Caliph & Emir: MPEG-7 photo annotation and retrieval by Mathias Lux (the winner)
- jReality: a java library for real-time interactive 3D graphics and audio by Steffen Weißmann, Charles Gunn, Peter Brinkmann, Tim Hoffmann, and Ulrich Pinkall
- xStreamer: modular multimedia streaming by Alexis Rombaut, Nicolas Staelens, Nick Vercammen, Brecht Vermeulen, Piet Demeester
- Music analysis, retrieval and synthesis of audio signals MARSYAS by George Tzanetakis
- TAPESTREA: a new way to design sound by Ananya Misra, Ge Wang, Perry R. Cook

For the first time this year, ACM Multimedia featured the Grand Challenge. It is a set of problems and issues proposed by industry leaders (such as Yahoo!, Google, HP, Nokia, and others), meant to engage the multimedia research community in solving relevant, interesting, and challenging questions about the industry’s two-to-five-year horizon for multimedia. The researchers were encouraged to submit working systems, as well as a short description in response to the challenge to win the Grand Challenge competition. The finalists were asked to pitch their idea and demo their system in exactly 180 seconds, with a 120-second question-and-answer phase. The selection of 14 finalists who, based on this format, presented top-notch ideas in rapid succession created a very colorful and fun event that was attended by virtually the entire conference audience of 450 people. More information about the event can be found here. The complete list of prizewinners can be found here.

Other Events
Larry Rowe was awarded the SIGMM technical achievement award, and gave a very interesting talk on the field of multimedia and making a career in it. Frank Nack hosted a very vivid interactive art program that was not to be missed.

The reception on the second day took place at the Beijing Film Academy. The film school is the largest institution specialized in the tertiary education for film and television production in Asia. The different showcases of both student work and the insight into the labs were not only exciting, but also a beautiful addition to the conference. The conference banquet was held in the historical Grand Ball Room of the Beijing hotel, and was one of the most impressive settings I have ever witnessed for a conference banquet.

In summary, this year's ACM Multimedia showed again that it is a conference that connects top-notch scientific work with fun and creative discussions, art, and show. I am looking forward to the coming years. ACM Multimedia 2010 is being held in Firenze, Italy.

Reviewer’s Report: ISMAR 2009

This guest post on ISMAR 2009 is by Felix G. Hamza-Lup, one of our reviewers and an assistant professor at Armstrong Atlantic State University. He also served as the professional network chair of the International Symposium on Mixed and Augmented Reality (ISMAR) 2009.

ISMAR (www.ismar09.org) is held in North America, Asia, and Europe on a rotating basis. This year, it was held in Orlando, Florida. ACM and IEEE, as well as a set of industrial partners, sponsored the event.

Augmented reality (AR) is the visual augmentation of the real environment with computer-generated images to improve and convey additional information to the user. Mixed reality (MR) represents any augmentation of the real environment, all the way to a complete virtual environment, but excluding it (as illustrated in this figure):

ISMAR 2009 followed three parallel tracks:

Science and Technology covered research sessions on novel user interfaces, motion tracking on mobile devices, human 
factors, and modeling, as well as posters and AR system demonstrations. This year, there was an increased interest in the development of AR applications in conjunction with mobile devices. Since the computational resources of mobile platforms are now powerful enough, the AR mobile applications market may increase significantly in the next few years, specifically driven by AR games. One of the most interesting demos was the EyePet for the Sony PlayStation, presented at the experiential learning workshop. The game uses a camera to allow a virtual pet to interact with a real user. The computer-generated pet is able to interpret different objects and react to the user’s gestures.

Arts, Media and Humanities covered research sessions on AR in sports, entertainment, and advertising, and on designing for the MR/AR experience. Posters and panel discussions about the applications of AR in the media and arts were also presented.

The Tutorial Track allowed students and participants to learn about state-of-the-art developments in motion tracking, MR/AR programming and experience creation, AR game design, 3D display technologies, and enhancing human performance with MR/AR. 

This year, several excellent keynote speakers presented their projects. Among them, Pattie Maes from MIT Media Lab presented the SixthSense project, and Natasha Tsakos presented her viewpoint on experience creation, blending technology and theater.

 ISMAR 2009 also hosted a tracking competition sponsored by Volkswagen. Participants in the competition had to determine the position of several objects in a room guided by specially placed markers. Contestants brought in their own hardware and software tracking systems, and earned bonus points for accuracy and speed. The winner was the Fraunhofer Institute for Computer Graphics Research IGD team, with eight tracked objects in 31:17 minutes with an accuracy of 20.7 mm, for a total of 11 points; the Metaio team followed with six points.

A professional networking group “ISMAR 2009” was set up on LinkedIn.com to keep the research community informed about future ISMAR conferences.

Last photo courtesy of G. Carmichael

Reference:
[1] P. Milgram, H. Takemura, A.Utsumi, F. Kishino. (1994) “Augmented Reality: A class of displays on the reality-virtuality continuum”, Proc. SPIE Vol. 2351, p. 282-292, Telemanipulator and Telepresence Technologies.

Reviewer's Report: SIGGRAPH 2009

This guest post on SIGGRAPH 2009 is by Piyush Kumar, one of our reviewers and an assistant professor at Florida State University.

SIGGRAPH--the annual computer graphics conference--was held this year in New Orleans. The SIGGRAPH conference began in 1974, and it and its related conferences have come to be regarded as the world’s premier conferences on graphics. SIGGRAPH is not only known for its high quality of technical paper submissions; it also houses many other interesting and intellectually stimulating sessions like the 3D Animation Festival, keynote speeches, courses on graphics and related areas, exhibitor tech talks, and emerging technology showcases. My summary covers only a miniscule part of SIGGRAPH 2009 that I found interesting. For more information on the event, this is a good starting point.

Keynote Speech: “Playing with Perception,” By Will Wright

In this fascinating talk, Will Wright—the inventor of SimCity—talked about a variety of things, starting with the cuteness factor of cats and how “cuteness” varied with one’s perception of pictures posted on the Internet. He also discussed information explosion and how the younger generation is more apt at processing this information than older folks. He raised the issue of the delivery of content, and argued that even a phone screen can be sufficient for watching good content, compared to the best 3D displays available.

Primarily, his talk was about how the consumption and production of information are becoming interlinked in new ways that have never before been seen. Overall, it was an extremely thought-provoking and interesting keynote.

Animation Festival

The Computer Animation Festival celebrated its 36th year as an internationally renowned forum for the presentation of the world's most innovative and stimulating computer-generated animated films. The animation festival features animations that are both artistically appealing and technically state of the art. The animations in this festival are usually glimpses of things that will be seen in the near future. There were many intellectually stimulating videos this year. I attended one session of the festival and liked the following videos:

1.     Silhouettes of Jazz: an animation showing different shapes from silhouettes of the same body

2.    Pigeon: Impossible: a comedy about weapon control and a pigeon messing with the remotes

3.     Alma: a ghostly animation that portrays a child who gets stuck inside a doll

4.     Window Pains: another comedy that portrays the pain of Windows users

5.     friends? a comedy portraying a cube’s friendship

      Fight for Kisses: a commercial depicting the fight between fathers and sons for attention

F

Technical Papers

This year, SIGGRAPH accepted 78 out of 439 submissions. In addition, eight papers were conditionally accepted to the journal ACM Transactions on Graphics, with major revisions. The number of submissions was slightly down from last year; the most logical explanation for this is that SIGGRAPH ASIA  is attracting submissions that usually would come to SIGGRAPH. Some of the papers featuring very innovative designs included (from the presentations I could attend):

1.     “Dark Flash Photography”: UV and IR light is flashed to compensate for darkness. This can also decrease the amount of light that the flash has to use to create a well-lit picture.

2.     “SkyFinder”: With this method, one can change the sky in a given photograph using an intuitive sky search from free photographs available on the Web.

3.     “Real-time Hand-tracking with a Color Glove”: The use of a specially designed glove allows for accurate hand tracking in real time.

4.     “Deforming Meshes That Split and Merge”: This paper shows how one can handle topology changes when tracking moving surfaces of deformable materials.

5.     “Mixed-integer Quadrangulation”: High-quality quadrangulations on meshes using integer programs are automatically generated via this method.

6.     “Single Scattering in Refractive Media with Triangle Mesh Boundaries”: This method handles refraction well while rendering.

7.     “An Efficient GPU-based Approach for Interactive Global Illumination”: This approach contributes toward global illumination and rendering techniques for the games of tomorrow.

Company Exhibits

There were many companies showing new products. Some that captured my attention:

1.     Blender: A free competitor to Maya, which can be scripted in Python.

2.     Autodesk: Had some nice tutorials on their software, including Maya.

3.      Dimension, 3DVIA, envisionTEC, Objet, RedEye ARC, and Shapeways (3D printing companies): Many 3D printing companies, which can print 3D shapes using materials ranging from metals to polymers, were displaying their products.

4.     FusionIO: Had an impressive wall on which movies streamed from a card were shown. This is now possible with most fast PCI-E-based SSD cards.

5.     3dMD: Showed a very high-resolution skin/face scanner for use by doctors.

6.     Schools and job fair: Many schools provided information about their graphics-related programs, and numerous companies were recruiting and interviewing on the spot.

Many emerging technologies were shown at SIGGRAPH. The one that caught my attention most was the 3D touch sensing device GelSight. It was based on very cheap hardware and could scan micron-level accurate height fields of small objects. The main principle used in this device is simple: When a gel is pressed with an object, it deforms to adapt to the shape. When viewed from below, the gel can be illuminated with lights to calculate the actual depth the gel was pressed. Although it is not clear how to extend this idea to scanning real 3D objects, it’s an interesting concept that can be used to scan small objects with textures that live in 2.5D.

  

 

All in all, SIGGRAPH 2009 was an interesting conference, and I look forward to attending SIGGRAPH 2010 in Los Angeles, CA.

Conference Spotlight: SIGGRAPH Asia

The first SIGGRAPH Asia conference will be held from December 10 – 13 in Singapore, and we are excited about SIGGRAPH expanding its geographical reach. Computing Reviews has a significant readership throughout Asia. We hope that both our readers and reviewers will be attending the conference.

If you are a Computing Reviews reviewer and would like to write a blog entry about a session you're planning to attend, please email us. There should be a lot of thought-provoking events and exhibits, and it would be great to get your take on what lies ahead in terms of computer graphics and interactive techniques.

Conference Spotlight: SIGGRAPH 2008

In just over a month, from August 11 – 15, SIGGRAPH 2008 will convene at the Los Angles Convention Center. This conference brings together the most innovative people in computer graphics and interactive techniques today. With a full program of speakers, classes, exhibitors, and much, much more, the conference promises to push the envelope of what is possible in computing.

We at Computing Reviews will be recruiting new reviewers at SIGGRAPH via an ad in the Program and Buyers Guide and inserts in the merchandise bag. Next year, we’ll be attending the conference in person. If you are a Computing Reviews reviewer and are attending SIGGRAPH this year, please shoot Angela Condon a quick email. We would love to know what we can do for reviewers attending the conference next year (reviewers’ lounge, lunch meeting, …), and how we can build a stronger sense of community and facilitate more exchange amongst our reviewers.

Click here to find out more about SIGGRAPH 2008.