It was my first time to attend SIGGRAPH — the biggest and most important conference in the research field of computer graphics. I really appreciate that ACM-W provided me the scholarship to attend this conference.

I met so many great researchers from different research groups, and got many inspirations from their wonderful presentations at SIGGRAPH. The ‘fast forward’ session was an exhilarating experience, where every paper was briefly summarized in a 2 hours / 30 seconds per paper session. This session showed me the importance of not only being an excellent researcher, but also the importance of clearly and concisely explaining one’s research. The keynote speaker Elliot Kotek from Not Impossible Labs gave an insightful and touching speech about providing low-cost and DIY solutions on an open-source platform, and thus enable high-tech devices to reach people in need all over the world. One of my favorite presentations in the session of technical papers was the one from MIT — The Visual Microphone: Passive Recovery of Sound from Video, talking about how to recover sounds from the video of an object. Based on the idea that the sound causes small vibrations of an object’s surface when it hits the object, this presentation showed how to extract those minute vibrations and partially recover the sound that produced them, using only high-speed video of the object. In this conference, I also found some research papers that were related with my current research project — recovering camera response curve from large photo collections. The paper “Transient Attributes for High-Level Understanding and Editing of Outdoor Scenes” was one of them. This paper showed how to edit images with a simple user interface based on transient attributes collected from the large image database and it was also one of the techniques discovering image tricks under large photo collections.

Thanks so much for the support from ACM-W. I learned a lot by talking with the presenters at SIGGRAPH, connected a big group of researchers in graphics field, met female researchers from other research groups, and began to have an idea of the current situation of graphics research in the film and game industry. It was really a great experience.