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
