SIGGRAPH is back in Vancouver with its premiere annual convention and exhibition and GRAND is taking part, bringing Canada's leading research in computer graphics and interactive technologies to the international forum.

The Association for Computing Machinery’s Special Interest Group on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques last held its yearly gathering in Vancouver in 2011. SIGGRAPH 2014 takes place from August 10 to 14 at the Vancouver Convention Centre.

As in previous conferences, GRAND scholarly work will be well represented at this year’s SIGGRAPH. Of the 13 technical papers co-authored by Canadian graphics researchers, 12 involve GRAND researchers and HQP – many from the University of Toronto and The University of British Columbia. Covering wide-ranging topics that introduce new ideas to the field, the papers show a high level of cross-university collaboration both within Canada and abroad.

"Canadian researchers in computer graphics and in human-computer interaction have long been prominent in their fields," noted GRAND Scientific Director, Eugene Fiume. "Many of these researchers joined GRAND in its first phase, and this year we have seen extremely strong representation by them in pre-eminent forums such as SIGCHI, UIST, Eurographics and SIGGRAPH.  It is exciting to see so many GRAND researchers working together and with their international colleagues to make research breakthroughs."

SIGGRAPH accepted 127 technical papers (out of 550 submissions) for this year’s showcase, an acceptance rate of 25 percent (one percent higher than 2013). Technical Papers reveal new directions and define the future of computer graphics and interactive techniques, adhering to the highest scientific standards. A committee made up of academia and industry experts selects the papers each year.

Researchers in GRAND are also taking part in featured talks, courses, and demonstrations of emerging technologies at SIGGRAPH. See below for a complete list and the names of participating GRAND researchers and industry partners.

Technical Papers

Organizing Heterogenous Scene Collection Through Contextural Focal Points^[VIDEO] (Multi-institutional | Hao Zhang, Simon Fraser University)

A Constructive Theory of Sampling for Image Synthesis Using Reproducing Kernel Bases^[VIDEO] (Multi-institutional | Christian Lessig, University of Toronto, Eugene Fiume, University of Toronto)

Exploratory Font Selection Using Crowd-Sourced Attributes^[VIDEO] (Peter O’Donovan, University of Toronto, Aaron Hertzmann, Former GRAND CNI now at Adobe Systems Incorporated)

A Similarity Measure for Illustration Style^[VIDEO] (Aaron Hertzmann, Former GRAND CNI now at Adobe Systems Incorporated)

Unifying Points, Beams, and Paths in Volumetric Light Transport Simulation (Derek Nowrouzezahrai, University of Montreal)

True2Form: 3D Curve Networks From 2D Sketches via Selective Regularization^[VIDEO] (Multi-institutional: Baoxuan Xu, William Chang, Alla Sheffer, The University of British Columbia, Karan Singh, University of Toronto, James McCrae, University of Toronto)

Interactive Shape Modeling Using a Skeleton-Mesh Co-Representation^[VIDEO] (Multi-institutional | Karan Singh, University of Toronto)

Temporal Frequency Probing for 5D Analysis of Global Light Transport^[VIDEO] (Multi-institutional | Matthew O’Toole, University of Toronto, Felix Heide, Lei Xiao, The University of British Columbia, Wolfgang Heidrich, The University of British Columbia, Kiriakos N. Kutulakos, University of Toronto)

From Capture to Simulation - Connecting Forward and Inverse Problems in Fluids^[VIDEO] (Multi-institutional | James Gregson, The University of British Columbia, Ivo Ihrke, INRIA Bordeaux, Wolfgang Heidrich, The University of British Columbia)

Topology-Varying 3D Shape Creation Via Structural Blending^[VIDEO] (Multi-institutional | Hao (Richard) Zhang, Simon Fraser University)

Detailed Water With Coarse Grids: Combining Surface Meshes and Adaptive Discontinuous Galerkin^[VIDEO] (Robert Bridson, The University of British Columbia)

Flow-Complex-Based Shape Reconstruction From 3D Curve Sketches^[VIDEO] (Bardia Sadri
Side Effects Software, Karan Singh, University Of Toronto)

Emerging Technologies

Spheree: A 3D Perspective-Corrected Interactive Spherical Scalable Display^[VIDEO] (Multi-institutional | Gregor Miller, The University of British Columbia, Sidney Fels, The University of British Columbia, Ian Stavness, University of Saskatchewan)

Visualizing Light Transport Phenomena With a Primal-Dual Coding Video Camera (Matthew O’Toole, Kyros Kutulakos, University of Toronto)

Studio

Virtual and Material – Applied Research at Emily Carr University of Art + Design (Maria Lantin, Keith Doyle, Emily Carr University of Art + Design)

Talks

OpenVL: A Developer-Level Abstraction of Computer Vision (Gregor Miller, Sidney Fels, The University of British Columbia)

Courses

Structure-Aware Shape Processing (Multi-institutional | Hao Zhang, Simon Fraser University)

Shape structure is about the arrangement and relations between shape parts, which enables analysis and processing at a high level. A whole new area of structure-aware shape-processing algorithms has emerged to illuminate structure in shapes and potentially change how we capture, manipulate, and interact with shapes.

Computational Cameras and Displays (Matthew O’Toole, University of Toronto)

The next wave of camera and display technology combines computational power and optics to extend the capabilities of traditional devices and enhance the visual experience. This course provides an overview of the latest computational cameras and displays, and their ability to analyze light-transport phenomena in real-world scenes.