Reply to:

Prof. Pere Brunet
Dept de Llenguatges i Sistemes Informatics
Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya
Edif. Omega, Campus Nord, despatx 302
E-08034 Barcelona, Spain

Dear colleague, dear member of the Eurographics Association,

I am writing you my last letter as Chairman of Eurographics, now that the New Year 2003 is just around the corner. In these days when I am retiring as Chairman, I would like to inform you on some of the services and activities we are offering to the members of the Association. As you know, besides 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. If you have already renewed your EG membership, I would like to thank you for putting again your trust on us. If you still have not renewed, let me encourage you to do it and to continue using our services !

First of all, I am very pleased to report that thanks to our Computer Graphics Forum managers ( the Editors D. Duke and R. Scopigno and the production team at Blackwell) and to all authors, contributors and reviewers, we are in a good CGF production pippeline and we have a healthy Journal, with an impact rating that has significantly improved in the last years. You can 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. Wide electronic dissemination of the material in the EG Digital Library has been agreed through TIB Hannover, and a significant effort is being made to enlarge the EG Digital Library and to move in the direction of electronic publishing. 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.

As I was informing you in my last letter, Eurographics is looking for new and innovative projects that can benefit its members and the Computer Graphics community. A budget is now available to fund interesting projects that match the strategic areas and interests of the Association. The evaluation of the proposals is based on the strategic interest of the project, the potential impact on the computer graphics community and the likelihood of success. A Call for Strategic Projects was approved at the Executive Committee held in Saarbruecken in September 2002, and can be found here. Proposals in the listed areas can still be submitted during the next weeks.

As you know, the Eurographics 2002 Conference in Saarbruecken broke all records for both submissions and participants. My congratulations to the organizers and my sincere thanks to them and to all committee members and participants for their contribution to the success of the event. The Conference Proceedings ( Issue 21:3 of the Computer Graphics Forum Journal) were distributed to the participants and have been sent to the members that asked for a subscription in paper form.

In addition to the annual Conference, Eurographics is organizing a number of Workshops. Seven workshops have been organized in 2002: Data Visualization, Virtual Environments, Parallel Graphics, Rendering, Graphics Hardware, Computer Graphics Education, and Simulation and Computer Animation (the last two were co-sponsored by Siggraph). 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 . A Volume Graphics workshop is scheduled for 2003 in Japan, and new workshops on Geometry Processing and Graphics and Virtual Heritage are also planned for next year. An agreement has been reached with ACM-Siggraph on the co-sponsoring of the future Symposia in Computer Animation, starting on 2003.

Our Stand at Siggraph'2002 was quite succesful, and our relationship with Siggraph has continued and becomed stronger. A total of three Workshop Proceedings have been produced in 2002 by ACM: Data Visualization, Virtual Environments and Rendering Techniques.

With regard to membership options, the all-inclusive Organizational Membership (for 840 Euro 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 160 Euro 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 ). A new category of "friends of Eurographics" is being settled.

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 promote country-based events and incentivate local iniciatives and activities. Local chapters have a central role in these iniciatives. The EG chapters in Italy and Ireland have hold their start-up events, and two new chapters are being established in Korea and Hungary. Our warmest welcome to all of them. The Korean chapter agreement has been signed, and the chapter is now alive, the chair being Dr. Hyeong-Seok Ko. There are good perspectives for the establishment of a French Eurographics Chapter.

New services include on-line secure payment which is now operational, a new electronic voting system, a procedure for retrieval of lost passwords and on-line membership renewals. A privacy policy is being developed and will be published soon.

The Executive Committee elections for 2003 will take place shortly. An electronic balloting system will be available this year as an alternative to the normal paper ballot system. Members will receive details of the electronic system with the paper ballot forms.

For your calendar, please don’t forget to mark  EG’2003 in Granada (Spain) from September 1-5, 2003 ( http://www.eg.org/EG2003 ). The deadlines for abstracts and full papers are january 29 and february 3th 2003, respectively. On 2004, we will have our Conference in Grenoble, France. 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 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.
 

Of course, even a brief report on our present activities and services is incomplete without appreciating the extremely valuable help of the many volunteers in the various committees and boards and the even more important support by all our members, making Eurographics a highly respected international Association in the wide area of Graphics and related fields. I would like to specially thank the EG vice-chairs, the officers, the members of the Executive Board and those of the Executive Committee 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 several new services to face the challenges of the oncoming years.

It was a distinct privilege to serve as Chairman of Eurographics and to be a part of a highly motivated team that has worked very hard to improve Eurographics’ services and standing. I trust you will support the new team chaired by Phil Willis in the same way you supported mine.

With best wishes for a successful and Happy New Year, Yours faithfully

With best wishes,
Yours faithfully
 

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