10 May 2010

To Whom It May Concern:

Computer graphics has enjoyed great success in terms of technology transfer. The computer games industry is currently an order of magnitude greater in annual turnover than the whole of the Hollywood film industry, and is still growing. Computer graphics research is therefore a very important field and contributes directly to this ever growing and very successful discipline. It is interesting to compare the success of another field of academic research, Software engineering, which has made little progress in several decades when considering the number of industrial projects started compared to the failure rate.

Due to the rapidly changing technology and the large number of researchers in computer graphics, fast dissemination of results has become very important in this field. So much so that conferences are very competitive and valued alongside journal publications. In fact many high quality conferences have such a high rejection rate that they are in fact more difficult to publish in than many journals.

ACM SIGGRAPH and Eurographics (EG) conferences, (the European equivalent to ACM SIGGRAPH), are well known to have a very high standard of refereeing and a very low acceptance rate (10% - 15%). In recent years there has been a system of two rounds of refereeing leading to journal status; both SIGGRAPH and EG are now published as a special issue of ACM Transactions on Graphics and Eurographics as Computer Graphics Forum. Both of these journals are considered very highly in the field. The leading conference in non-photorealistic rendering for computer graphics is NPAR. Acceptance rates are extremely small (< 15%) and the conference is very highly rated, certainly far more than virtually all software engineering conferences and it has acceptance rates less than most journals.

For some years tenure committees in most North American Universities that have computer graphics research groups have come to understand that certain conferences outweigh journals in this rapidly changing field.

Yours Sincerely,
Prof. Brian Wyvill© (Professor and Tier One Canada Research Chair)

May 19th 2010

To Whom It May Concern:

I am writing to you as general chair of the ACM 8th International Symposium on Non-Photorealistic Animation and Rendering (NPAR), held 7-10 June 2010 in Annecy, France. I have been asked to provide a statement on the standing of NPAR as a publication forum in Computer Graphics.

Computer Graphics (CG) is a discipline of Computer Science (CS); a field somewhat unusual among the sciences in that we hold conference publications in very high regard. Unlike other sciences (e.g. Biology, Psychology), submission to a CS conference typically requires a full paper to be written and subjected to the full double-blind peer review process. In some of the best CG conferences (e.g. ACM SIGGRAPH and Eurographics) there is a multi-tier system of reviewers and an opportunity for authors to reply to reviewers and revise their papers, resembling a fast-track model of journal publication route. Indeed, CG conferences are often regarded as preferential forms of dissemination in a fast moving field where innovation is rapidly transferred to the IT and creative industries.

The best CG conferences are very competitive and valued alongside journal publications. I believe it would be difficult to identify a good CG research group who did not count ACM SIGGRAPH, Eurographics, or the symposia endorsed by those organisations, as being among the top publication targets for CG. In fact many high quality CG conferences have sufficiently low acceptance rates (e.g. 10-15% for ACM SIGGRAPH and Eurographics) that they are infact more difficult to publish in than many journals. Recently this has motivated journals to adopt the proceedings of such conferences as journal special issues.

NPAR is the leading specialist CG conference devoted to Non-photorealistic rendering (NPR). NPR is a crossdisciplinary CG field with roots in the early nineties, focusing on the emulation of artistic and expressive styles for visual communication and aesthetics. NPR has contributed to movies and video games, as well as in architectural illustration and experimental animation. NPAR was founded by academics publishing regularly at ACM SIGGRAPH and Eurographics who desired a conference for NPR in its own right. To this day many NPAR reviewers and authors of accepted NPAR papers, publish and participate in ACM SIGGRAPH. This has lead to NPAR being regarded as very highly rated and selective.

As a CG researcher in the United Kingdom, my colleagues and I are frequently frustrated by the perceived low standing of conferences in CG (and CS more generally) due to the emphasis placed on journal publication by the other sciences. This has caused certain conferences to be omitted from indices such as JCR, and in some cases overlooked even though a leading CG conference typically has higher impact factor than a CG journal. This lead to representations of views similar to those contained in this letter, being made by CS academics to the UK Research Assessment Exercise (RAE 2008) to correct for the misperception of low quality for CS conferences. For this reason I am pleased to write in support of CG conferences, and NPAR, as being among the highest quality forums for dissemination of CG research.

Yours Sincerely,
John P. Collomosse©