Sylvain Paris, a Fellow at Adobe Research, is an expert on computer graphics. His research focuses on image-based modeling and computational photography, and he has contributed to Adobe products including Photoshop, Lightroom, After Effects, and more.
Last year, Paris was tapped by organizers of the SIGGRAPH 2021 conference—a top venue on computer graphics and interactive techniques—to serve as the Chair of the Technical Papers program. In this audio interview, Paris shares his experience coordinating graphics experts tasked with choosing papers for this highly selective conference.
It was a big job. He recruited 76 committee members, including 22 members who served for the first time, to select papers for the Technical Papers program. Paris describes his work as similar to that of an orchestra conductor: You don’t play an instrument, but you set the beat. Following a rigorous, double-anonymous selection process, the program’s reviewers accepted 149 papers to be presented at the virtual conference in August, along with 28 papers that appeared in Transactions on Graphics this year.
Serving as chair, Paris did not review papers, but he did get a window into the latest work in the field and shares his thoughts here. He also told us about his own history with the conference going back to his graduate student work at France’s INRIA. The subject of his very first SIGGRAPH paper in 2004? Capturing the geometry of hair.
