This proposal supports student involvement and attendance at the 2012 ACM Siggraph Conference. This is the premier computer graphics conference in the world, attracting over 15,000 attendees and typically filling over 100,000 feet of exhibition space. The annual film show is a venue for viewing the latest advances in animation and visualization. Although many attendees come for the exhibition, the Siggraph Conference has long been the premier place to publish technical papers in computer graphics. The Siggraph Pioneers (20+ years of work in the field) started a mentoring program in 2003 to add more students to the technology pipeline. While small in number, the impact has been high as the students do not merely attend the conference, but rather are mentored by longstanding members of the community. Because each Pioneer is assigned no more than two students, the Pioneer guides the students to talks, courses, etc. that were not immediately on the student's radar.
The intellectual merit and broader impact of the proposed activity lies in the educational opportunities provided the student by the mentoring process. The program also focuses on underrepresented groups (e.g., women, Hispanics, and African-American) who would have no opportunity to hear about Siggraph, let alone attend, without the mentoring program. The students are exposed to the latest research and hardware covering the use of computer graphics for numerous topics that benefit society ranging from engineering design to entertainment. Sample student reactions can be found at http://pioneers.siggraph.org/student_letters.html
Goals: The goal of this project was to provide partial support of $300 to 15-20 high school students so that they can attend ACM SIGGRAPH 2012 in LA. The main motivation is to get more high school students excited about science and technology and pursue careers in this field. SIGGRAPH (www.siggraph.org), a special interest group of the Association for Computing Machinery, holds the world’s premier conference devoted to computer graphics and interactive techniques. The conference has run continuously since 1974. The organization started a SIGGRAPH-Asia version in 2008. Attendance in the U.S. routinely exceeds 15,000. We requested this funding for this U.S. version of SIGGRAPH. SIGGRAPH2012 was held in Los Angeles CA from August 5-9. The annual conference is well-regarded and is considered as the place to publish, experience, and learn about the latest in computer graphics and interactive techniques. In order to encourage more high school students into technical areas, SIGGRAPH Pioneers group (a subgroup within the large organization) started a Mentoring program in 2003 to try to add more students, in particular females and minorities, to the technology pipeline. While a relatively small number (about 15 students per year) attend each year, this group has continuously collected student impressions after the conference to gauge impact. The Mentoring program has been replicated by other organizations. In this case, we targeted SIGGRAPH 2012, as SIGGRAPH combines excellent technical papers, courses, a large trade show, a computer animation festival, an art show, emerging graphics technology, and a number of hands-on activities. The conference has direct impact on computer graphics evolution in arts and entertainment. The same basic technology is also applied in product design, visualization, medicine, seismic exploration, building architecture, chemistry, physics, biology, and any other domain that uses graphics as a primary mechanism to communicate. Participants routinely attend who have interests in all the above technical fields and many more. Tasks Performed and Accomplished under the NSF Grant The PI, Co-PI and some other staff and SIGGRAPH Education Committee members were involved in recruiting students. The overall effort has been sponsored by SIGGRAPH Pioneers program, the SIGGRAPH conference, and NSF. Advertising this Mentoring program among high school students to apply for this program included mailing lists, direct emails and calls to local area schools and school boards. This program was widely advertised over the WWW and we have included the sample WWW site that was used to recruit. The WWW page with this information is available at: http://plone.siggraph.org/programs/pioneers/student-participation/ It was also advertised on the SIGGRAPH CG Educators mailing list, which has over 300 members. We selected 18 students from Grades 10-12. Most of them were aged 15-18. Their names, grades, ages, research interests and reasons for selecting for this program are given in Table II. During the actual conference, many senior mentors were recruited and each of these students had one-on-one time with these mentors. The mentors answered many questions related to computer graphics, discussed career option and suggested them to attend the talks, exhibition, art shows, etc. held during SIGGRAPH 2012, based on their background and interests. After the conference, we collected feedback from these students about their experience about the conference, what kind of exposure did they get, and what kind of impact did they have? Their comments have been collected as part of Table I. These comments from the students indicate that most of them have found this experience quite useful. Our expectation is that this program and the support from NSF would help many of these students to pursue technical career or get more interested in computer graphics, including students from underrepresented populations. The results documented in Table I are published on plone.siggraph.org/programs/pioneers/.
