Panels Submissions

SIGGRAPH 2018 Panels offer a space where discussion and debate on important topics in computer graphics and interactive techniques can freely flow.
Submissions have closed

Submission Deadline

Tue, 13 Feb 2018, 22:00 utc/gmt

Time Zone Conversion All Submissions Deadlines

Interact. Share. Discuss.

SIGGRAPH 2018 Panels offer a space where discussion and debate on important topics in computer graphics and interactive techniques can freely flow. Here, important voices converge, collaborate and engage in dialogue about the topics that are important in computer graphics and interactive techniques. The SIGGRAPH Panels are a place for questions and discussion, expert opinions and unique points of view. Get ready to expand your mind.

SIGGRAPH 2018 seeks panels that include leading experts in computer graphics and interactive techniques. Panels should present a type of information, experience and perspective that is unique to attendees. They should focus on discussions that generally include a moderator and three or four confirmed panelists with varying experiences or perspectives. Good panels may include discussion, disagreement, controversy and audience interaction.

Panels are a mixture of sessions organized by special invitation and/or selected from juried proposals submitted through the online submission process.

How to Submit

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Submissions are due by 22:00 UTC/GMT, 13 February 2018.

Log in to the submission portal, select “Make a New Submission tab,” and then select the General Submission form. To see the information you will need to submit, view the Sample Submission Form

Basic submission information, including the title of the panel, a brief summary (50 words or less), and the name, affiliation, and contact information for each confirmed speaker.
A presentation format. To propose a panel, please select Panel as your presentation format. You will then be taken to the forms specific to this presentation format. Please see below for more information about required information and materials for this presentation format.
One “representative image” suitable for use on the conference website and promotional materials. See Representative Image Guidelines.
An abstract (two pages maximum) describing your panel (PDF).
Please provide short bios for each of your panelists. To ensure optimal discussion, a panel should consist of a moderator and three to four panelists. Panelists must be confirmed at the time of submission. The jury makes panel decisions based on the proposed topic and participants; if the participants have not been confirmed, the jury will not accept the panel proposal.
A list of potential submission categories and keywords is provided to help ensure your submission is reviewed and juried appropriately. Please select the categories and keywords carefully.

You may also optionally provide the following material and information:

PDFs of news articles related to your panelists or proposed topic for jury consideration

Educator’s Resources Submission option. Those submitting content to a SIGGRAPH conference have the option of donating materials of educational value to ACM SIGGRAPH online resources for the benefit of the education community. Learn more

For more information about uploading files for your submission, see Uploading Files

For additional submission information, see Submissions FAQ.

Evaluation

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Panels are forums for experts in a particular area to have a guided, interactive dialog with the audience about a specific topic. A good panel submission proposes an interesting topic, identifies panelists who will bring diverse opinions to the discussion, and outlines a proposed structure for the panel discussion itself. Some reasons panel proposals are rejected:

1. The panel organizer has not confirmed specific speakers or has identified speakers but not clearly conveyed why those speakers are the best ones to address the proposed topic.

2. The proposed panel topic is of very narrow interest and will only appeal to a very small number of attendees.

3. The proposed panel topic is too broad or not defined well enough to engender a focused discussion.

4. The proposed panel lacks structure, or the structure fails to allow significant audience interaction. A panel that consists primarily of prepared statements by the panelists will be rejected.

5. The jury believes the panelists do not offer sufficiently diverse viewpoints.

Jurors are asked to evaluate your submission using four criteria: Concept, Novelty, Interest, and Quality. The final submission score is based on a combination of these factors. For example, a high-quality panel that has broad appeal and is unlike other recent SIGGRAPH panels has a good chance of acceptance, while a poorly motivated submission of interest to few attendees (or that duplicates recent panels) will probably be rejected.

Concept

How exceptional are the ideas, problems, solutions, aesthetics, etc. presented in this submission? How coherently does the submission convey its overall concept? Is the concept similar to existing ones, or does it stand out? This criterion is particularly applicable to submissions that put together existing technologies into a single product (for example, demos, animations, art pieces). Submissions of this type, where the individual technologies are not necessarily new but their combination is, are evaluated on both the final product and how well proposed technologies integrate to meet the desired goals. Many submissions in this area are rejected because they do what existing systems do, and they do not demonstrate that the proposed approach leads to better results.

Novelty

How new and fresh is this work? Is it a new, ground-breaking approach to an old problem, or is it an existing approach with a slightly new twist? You must first demonstrate to the jury that your work is sufficiently different from existing approaches. Second, you should evaluate you work in the context of other approaches where appropriate: Is it faster? Easier to use? Does it give better results? Is it more accurate? Many submissions are rejected either because the work is too similar to existing work or because the submission materials did not convince the jury that the improvements were substantial enough.

Interest

Will conference attendees want to see this? Will it inspire them? Are the results or approach appealing to a broad audience? This is partly a measure of how broad the potential audience is and partly a measure of the overall clarity and novelty of the submission. A submission in a very niche area is more likely to be accepted if the results are exceptionally better than what exists already, or if the proposed solution might be applicable to other areas.

Quality, Craft, and Completeness

This is a measure of how well-written the abstract is and the quality of the supporting materials. The abstract must effectively communicate both the problem and the solution in enough detail and clarity that the jury can evaluate it. You must also convince the jury that your solution works. Many submissions are rejected because, while the problem and solution seemed interesting, the materials did not convince the jury that the solution had actually been implemented and evaluated. If your submission has an animation, simulation, or interactive component, then including a video is essential.

Upon Acceptance

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You will be notified of acceptance or rejection at the end of April.

If your panel is accepted, you must prepare and submit a revised abstract (two pages maximum). This abstract must be submitted by 9 May 2018. Please prepare your abstract using these templates and instructions. For your reference, here is a well-formatted example. If we do not receive your revised abstract by 9 May, you will not be allowed to present at SIGGRAPH 2018.

After we receive your revised abstract, we will provide complete information on your presentation: length, time, location. We will also provide information on how to submit final versions of your accepted work and the deadlines for final updates.

You must also attend and present your work at SIGGRAPH 2018 in Vancouver, Canada. If you are unable to present, your panel will be canceled.

After acceptance, the submission portal will allow you to update basic information about your work and upload any final materials for inclusion in the conference program and website. This information needs to be finalized two weeks after acceptance. Final versions of accepted work must be submitted before required deadlines (normally one week after acceptance notification). You will receive information on how to submit final versions of your accepted work and the deadlines for final updates.

Most registration and travel costs to attend SIGGRAPH 2018 are at your own expense; however, each accepted panel receives recognition as specified in the SIGGRAPH 2018 Recognition Policy.

The time and location of your panel will be posted on the SIGGRAPH 2018 website well in advance of the conference.

You will be responsible for managing your moderator (if it’s not you) and panelists. This includes coordinating with conference organizers to prepare the panel description and speaker information for publication in the website and conference materials. It will also require that you distribute registration discount codes to your panelists and that you check in with them at the conference.

Please note: Panels are about people and discussion, not presentations. Panels should not rely on PowerPoint slides, video clips, or other visual materials. We may schedule them in rooms without video projection.

Timeline

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22:00 UTC/GMT, 13 February
Submission deadline

First Week of May
Acceptance or rejection notices are sent to all General Submissions submitters

16 May
Deadline to make any changes to materials for publication
Abstract (two pages maximum) due. If we do not receive your revised abstract by 16 May, you will not be allowed to present at SIGGRAPH 2018.

12-16 August
Vancouver Convention Centre
SIGGRAPH 2018, Vancouver, Canada

ACM RIGHTS MANAGEMENT FORM

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If Your Work Is Accepted For Presentation At SIGGRAPH 2018: You must complete the ACM Rights Management Form. The form will be sent to all submitters whose work is accepted.

Your representative image and text may be used for promotional purposes. Several SIGGRAPH 2018 programs – Appy Hour, Art Gallery, Art Papers, Computer Animation Festival, Real-Time Live!, Technical Papers, and all installation programs – will prepare preview videos for pre-conference promotion of accepted content, which may include a portion of the video you submitted for review.

ETHICS OF REVIEW PROCESS

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Protect Ideas

As a reviewer for SIGGRAPH, you have the responsibility to protect the confidentiality of the ideas represented in the submissions you review. Protection of the ideas in the submissions you receive means:

Do not discuss or show the submission to anyone else, including colleagues or students.
Do not show supporting assets (for example, video, images, etc.) to non-reviewers.
Do not use ideas from the submission you review to develop new ones.

Avoid Conflicts of Interest

As a reviewer of a SIGGRAPH submission, you have a certain power over the reviewing process. It is important for you to avoid any conflict of interest. Even though you would, of course, act impartially on any submission, there should be absolutely no question about the impartiality of your review. Thus, if you are assigned a submission where your review would create a possible conflict of interest, you should return the submission and not submit a review.

Conflicts of interest include (but are not limited to) situations in which:

You work at the same institution as one of the submitters.
You have been directly involved in the work and will be receiving credit in some way. For example, if you are a member of the author’s thesis committee, and the submission is about the author’s thesis work, then you are involved.
You suspect that others might see a conflict of interest in your involvement. For example, even though Microsoft Research in Seattle and Beijing are in some ways more distant than Berkeley and MIT, there is likely to be a perception that they are “both Microsoft,” so folks from one should not review submissions from the other.
You have collaborated with one of the submitters in the past three years (more or less). Collaboration is usually defined as having written a paper or grant proposal together, although you should use your judgment.
You were the MFA/MS/PhD advisor of one of the submitters or the MFA/MS/PhD advisee of one of the submitters. Funding agencies typically consider advisees/advisors to represent a lifetime conflict of interest. SIGGRAPH has traditionally been more flexible than this, but you should think carefully before reviewing a submission you know to be written by a former advisee/advisor.

In short, if you recognize the work or the contributor and feel it could present a conflict of interest, send the submission back to the General Submission chair as soon as possible so someone else can be assigned to review it.

Be Serious

We have a responsibility to take the reviewing process seriously. You should make an effort to do a good review. This is obvious. But one of the complaints we have heard about the SIGGRAPH review process is that some reviews can be so sketchy that it looks like the reviewer did not even seem to take the time to read the submission carefully. A casual or flippant review of a submission that the author has seriously submitted is not appropriate. In the long run, casual reviewing is a most damaging attack on the SIGGRAPH conference. There is no dishonor in being too busy to do a good review, or to realize that you have over-committed yourself and cannot review all the submissions you agreed to review. But it is a big mistake to take on too much, and then not back out early enough to allow recovery. If you cannot do a decent job, give the submission back and say so. But please, do it early so that there is time to select another reviewer before the deadline.

Be Professional

Belittling or sarcastic comments are unnecessary in the reviewing process. Be objective and constructive in your reviews. The most valuable comments in a review are those that help the contributor understand the shortcomings of their work and how they might improve it. If you intensely dislike a submission, give it a low score. That makes a sufficient statement.

In Summary

Adherence to ethics makes the whole reviewing process more complicated and sometimes less efficient. But convenience, efficiency, and expediency are not good reasons to contravene ethics. It is precisely at those times when it would be easier or more efficient to bend the rules that it is most important to do the right thing. Ultimately, spending that energy and time is an investment in the long-term health of the general submissions, the conference, and the community.