Reply to:

Prof. Pere Brunet
Dept de Llenguatges i Sistemes Informatics
Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya
Av. Diagonal 647, Edif ETSEIB, Pl. 8
E-08028 Barcelona, Spain

Dear colleague, dear member of the Eurographics Association,

Following my first three letters, I would like to continue informing you on some of the services and activities we are offering and planning for the members of the Association. Apart from the Computer Graphics Forum Journal, the annual Conference and the different Workshops in specific areas, Eurographics is introducing new services like the Digital library and a number of on-line services to face our new challenges.

The Computer Graphics Forum Journal is in a good production and delivery schedule, with a healthy number of papers in the reviewing pipeline. Volume 20 is closed, with issue 20:4 and the annual CD having been shipped. I would like to thank our CGF managers (the Editors and the production team at Blackwell) for their effort and efficiency. On the other hand, you can also access the Digital material, the retroactive digitization of CGF, the Conference and Workshop Proceedings or the Computer Graphics Forum with multimedia attachments (both published and accepted papers) if you visit the Digital Library  at   http://diglib.eg.org/  where you will also find a Bibliography Database with the BibTeX database of papers. Continuing with Publications, please note that EG has discontinued the printed list of bookshop items and replaced it by the online publications list. The online list is updated as soon as new publications appear.

Eurographics is organizing a number of relevant Workshops in specific areas. The following workshops have been organized in 2001: Visualization, Virtual Environments (VE), Volume Graphics, Rendering, Graphics Hardware, Animation & Simulation, and Multimedia. Details on these events together with announcements of upcoming EG Workshops can be found at the online pages of the Workshop Working Groups  http://www.eg.org/EG/Docs/Workshops.html .

Eurographics workshop proceedings will be published by ACM press starting 2002. The proceedings will change format, the new format being the present format of the Computer Graphics Forum and Conference proceedings. The electronic version of the papers together with additional material will be available to members through the EG Digital Library, whereas the table of contents and some sample material will be made generally available.

Apart from the publication of workshop proceedings, our relatioship with Siggraph has continued and becomed stronger. Two Campfires have been held in 2001 and three are already planned for 2002 (visual learning, augmented reality and disabilities). An agreement has been reached with Siggraph to exchange representatives between the two Executive Committees, starting with the March 2002 meeting.

One of the Eurographics goals is to create innovative new offers and services, together with good quality events and the journal. Local contacts in different countries are being used to promote country-based events and to incentivate local iniciatives and activities through the Eurographics promotions board. Local chapters have a central role in these iniciatives. In this context, I would like to remark that two new EG chapters have been created during 2001, in Italy and Ireland. My warmest welcome to them and specially to the local promoters. Some other chapters are on the way. With regard to membership options, the all-inclusive Organizational Membership (for 1290 SFr per year) offers all services and benefits previously known as ‘Institutional Membership’ with all options taken. We encourage you to have a look at the details at   http://www.eg.org/EG/Organization/member.html  . The Educational Package (for 250 SFr per year) offers all students, faculty and staff at one institution electronic access to STARs, Tutorials, the full ‘Best Paper Award’ contributions from the Annual event and CGF’s content pages. ( http://www.eg.org/EG/organization/edu_member.pdf ).

Monica Bordegoni has accepted to become our promotions deputy chair, and Joaquim Jorge has prepared a new Eurographics brochure for promotion in workshops and other events. I would like to welcome Monica and to thank both of them for the time and effort devoted to our Association.

Eurographics has been preparing the necessary infrastructure for electronic voting. A ballot is being sent to members to vote the changes to the EG Constitution that will allow electronic voting in addition to our standard paper voting procedure.

The Executive Board had an strategic meeting last November, and a number of proposals for giving more and better services to our members will be presented at the March Executive Committee meeting. I will report on them and inform you in my next chairman letter. In particular, the Executive Board decided to create a new Educators Board to approach the needs of Computer Graphics educators and give specific services in this particular domain.

Following a request from the German Chapter, Eurographics will provide a section in the Digital Library for German Ph.D. thesis. Other chapters will probably join the initiative. Only Eurographics members will have the right to upload material into this section, but access will be open to the general community.

For your calendar, please don’t forget to mark  EG’2002 in Saarbruecken from September 2-6, 2002 ( http://www.eg.org/EG2002 ). The deadlines for abstracts and full papers are january 30 and february 4th 2002, respectively. On 2003, we will have our Conference in Granada, Spain from September 1-6th. To help candidates to prepare their bids for the organization of future Conferences, a version of the EG Conference Guide has been prepared and is publically available in the web pages of the Association.

I would not like to finish without thanking the EG vice-chairs, the officers, the members of the Executive Board and Executive Committee and all volunteers for the time and effort they devote to the Association Their time and work has resulted on an improvement of the overall services to members and on the introduction of attractive new services to face the challenges of the oncoming years.

I do hope that you will use the new services offered by EG and you find them helpful. Please visit our organization pages for more information.If you have any queries or suggestions please feel free to contact the Association’s officer you feel most appropriate, or myself
 

With best wishes for 2002,
Yours faithfully
 

Pere Brunet
Chairman (pere@lsi.upc.es)