EVENTS Sponsored by ERCIM
ERCIM News No.35 - October 1998

EURO-GRAPHICS’98 - Discovering New Realities

by David Duce and Joaquim Jorge



Eurographics’98, the 19th annual Conference of the European Association for Computer Graphics took place in Lisbon, Portugal. As the leading international computer graphics conference in Europe, it has become a vital meeting point for researchers, practitioners, teachers and users all over the world. It is a forum for presenting the latest developments in graphics technology, case studies in advanced graphics systems and applications, as well as surveying current trends.

Eurographics, the European Association for Computer Graphics, was founded in 1980 to promote the advancement of computer graphics research and technology in European countries. It is a non-profit organization for individuals and institutions engaged in this field. Several ERCIM-affiliated institutions are also affiliated with Eurographics such as CLRC-RAL and CWI.

This year, we chose the theme Discovering New Realities in celebration of five centuries of Portuguese discoveries and as a challenge to researchers to come up with imaginative and well thought out contributions describing exciting new applications.

EG’98 was organized by the Eurographics Portuguese Chapter (GPCG) and took place in the Conference Center of Fundacao Calouste Gulbenkian from 31 August to 4 September 1998. Over 250 people from 26 countries attended the conference, the largest group being the Portuguese delegation with 56 participants.

The technical programme of EG’98 spread over three days, including thirty two Refereed Papers, twenty Short Presentations, three Invited Papers and six State of the Art Reports. The two days before the Technical Programme were devoted to Tutorials which covered topics from Java3D and VRML97 to hierarchical methods for computer graphics and rendering in affordable parallel environments. Two Workshops organized by the Association also took place. The 11th workshop on graphics hardware, a joint initiative with ACM/SIGGRAPH and the sixth workshop on animation and simulation gathered a total of sixty participants. An industry track featured professionals from Microsoft, SGI, SUN, France Telecom and others to present recent developments, discuss major trends in topics ranging from multimedia documents to computer graphics in art and the relation between multimedia standards such as MPEG-4 and graphics systems.

One distinguishing feature in EG’98 was the emphasis on fostering student participation. This years’ conference featured a short presentation/posters technical track to provide an alternative for those participants who would like to have the opportunity to present and discuss quality work in progress, well formulated but untested ideas or interesting application results. EG’98 also featured reduced fees and low-cost accommodation arrangements for students. We were successful in attracting over forty students whose enthusiasm and fresh ideas greatly contributed to the conference’s success.

This years’ conference featured three distinguished keynote speakers, whose talks highlighted a shift in paradigm taking place in the field, away from polygon rendering techniques into interactive techniques and multimedia integration, and from single user applications to cooperative applications. Andries van Dam from Brown University, opened the conference with a discussion on the future of interactive systems. James Foley discussed the convergence of graphics and imaging and José Encarnação delivered the closing keynote addressing the challenges and innovations for the next generation of media interfaces.

The Gunter Enderle Award for the best technical presentation was awarded to Joachim Buhmann (University of Bonn), Dieter W. Fellner (Braunschweig University of Technology), Marcus Held, Jens Ketterer, and Jan Puzicha (University of Bonn) for their paper entitled Dithered Color Quantization. The prize for the Best Student Paper (a new prize at this conference) was awarded jointly to Henrik Weimer (Rice University) and Lisa M. Streit (University of Alberta) for the papers (respectively) Subdivision Schemes for Thin Plate Splines and Importance Driven Halftoning.

Eurographics’99 will take place in Milano, Italy, celebrating the 20 years of the European association.

To find out more details about EG98, consult the Eurographics Association’s home page http://www.eg.org or send email to info@eg98.gpcg.pt.

Please contact the Conference Co-chairs:

Joaquim Jorge - INES
Tel: +351 1 310 00 00
E-mail: jaj@inesc.pt

David Duce - CLRC
Tel: +44 1235 44 5511
E-mail: dad@inf.rl.ac.uk


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