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,

In this letter, I would like to continue informing 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 !

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. I am also pleased to report that thanks to our CGF managers ( the Editors D. Duke and R. Scopigno and the production team at Blackwell), we are in a good production and delivery schedule, issue 21:4 and the annual CD being in the production pipeline. 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. 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 a new initiative, 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 will be 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. You are encouraged to submit proposals in the listed areas.

In addition to the annual Conference, Eurographics is organizing a number of Workshops. The following 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 .

Our Stand at Siggraph'2002 was quite succesful. Promotional material was distributed, a number of books and proceedingd were sold, and new members joined Eurographics. Thanks to Andy Day, David Arnold and to their student helpers for their organization. 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.

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 have been established in Korea and Hungary. Our warmest welcome to all of them. 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.

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 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.

Our new Education Board has started its activities with the goals of bringing the community together, developing resources and curriculum initiatives, making high quality resources available to the teaching community and increasing the profile of Graphics teaching.

The Eurographics Fellows meeting, chaired by David Duce and having Jose Encarnaçao as vice-chair, decided to nominate Heinrich Mueller as a new EG Fellow. My congratulations, and many thanks to Heinrich for his dedication and effort.

Seven new members have been elected to the Eurographics Executive Committee: Steve Cunningham, Dieter Fellner, Kari Pulli, Holly Rushmeier, Vaclav Skala, Carlo Vandoni and Philip Willis. Our warmest welcome to all of them, and many thanks in advance for the time and effort they will spend on serving the Association.

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 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,
Yours faithfully
 

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