The SIGGRAPH Doctoral Consortium is a new initiative that will take place at SIGGRAPH 2018 in Vancouver, BC, 11 August 2018. We chatted with Consortium Chair Maneesh Agrawala of the Stanford University Brown institute for Media Innovation to find out more about the Consortium.
SIGGRAPH: Tell us about yourself. What is your area of research and how did you get involved with SIGGRAPH?
Maneesh Agrawala (MA): I’m Maneesh Agrawala, Forest Baskett Professor of Computer Science and Director of the Brown Institute for Media Innovation at Stanford. My work focuses on understanding how people communicate through visual media and then developing tools for creating visual content based on this understanding. I’ve been attending SIGGRAPH since 1994 when I was finishing my undergraduate degree.
SIGGRAPH: What was the impetus for the SIGGRAPH Doctoral Consortium?
MA: Historically, the SIGGRAPH Technical Papers Program is an excellent venue for presenting the best research in Computer Graphics, but as the program has gotten bigger and talks have gotten shorter, there has been a reduction in the amount of interaction between researchers, especially between students and more established researchers in the field. We developed the Doctoral Consortium to increase the opportunity for interaction between established researchers and Ph.D. students.
SIGGRAPH: Why is an event like the SIGGRAPH Doctoral Consortium important to Ph.D. students?
MA: The Doctoral Consortium is a venue for a small group of Ph.D. students in their final year or so to present their work and get in-depth feedback on it from a committee of renowned experts in Computer Graphics. The consortium will give these students a chance to interact with the other participants and the committee to stimulate an exchange of ideas, suggestions and experiences.
SIGGRAPH: How can a doctoral candidate find out more information and get involved in the Consortium?
MA: Submit an application to the program (it requires writing up a short 4-page description of your work). Complete details on how to submit an application is available here and remember that the deadline for submissions is 18, June 2018.
Maneesh Agrawala is the Director of the Brown Institute for Media Innovation at Stanford University. He works on computer graphics, human computer interaction and visualization. His focus is on investigating how cognitive design principles can be used to improve the effectiveness of audio/visual media. The goals of this work are to discover the design principles and then instantiate them in both interactive and automated design tools. He received an Okawa Foundation Research Grant (2006), an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Fellowship (2007), an NSF CAREER Award (2007), a SIGGRAPH Significant New Researcher Award (2008), a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship (2009), and an Allen Distinguished Investigator Award (2014).
Additional Doctoral Consortium Committee Members:
- Kavita Bala, Cornell University
- Keenan Crane, Carnegie Mellon University
- Karen Liu, Georgia Institute of Technology
- Gordon Wetzstein, Stanford University
